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Hearst Buys Social Shopper Kaboodle

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This is well reported by now, but Hearst has acquired Kaboodle, which started as a kind of personalized shopping list and bookmarking site and has morphed into a hybrid social shopping/networking site. There are various angles on this story:

  • The effort of traditional media to adapt to the online culture
  • The power of social networking

I’ve written about Kaboodle several times in the past. I had thought eBay might be the buyer (given their partnership), but eBay bought StumbleUpon instead. Kaboodle also has a relationship with Conde Nast that reportedly won’t be affected, according to Om Malik’s posting (he reports the acquisition price as $40 million according to an unnamed source).

Local shopping and social shopping are the two trends that are important (mobile is a subset of local) in online shopping. Yahoo!’s recent “ROBO” survey underscores how the Internet drives offline transactions far more than e-commerce (average conversion rates: 2%-3%). ShopLocal is a site that sits in both spaces, local shopping and (more recently) community.

This entry was posted on August 8, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Acquisitions, Shopping, Social search/community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Hearst Buys Social Shopper Kaboodle”

  1. IAC’s Pronto Adds Social Media Features « Screenwerk Says:
    September 11, 2007 at 4:02 pm

    […] “social shopping” site Kaboodle was recently acquired by Hearst. Indeed social shopping (community) is one of two important trends in shopping, the other […]

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