Snip.it

» see snip.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Fifteen months. That is the entire run, October 2011 to 22 January 2013, and the last day was also the day the acquisition hit the wires. There was no wind-down period and no final post about the journey. Yahoo confirmed the purchase, and the service stopped taking anyone new in the same news cycle.

Snip.it was a San Francisco web app for clipping news articles and arranging them into collections that looked good. The pitch, which every write-up used, was Pinterest for news: you grabbed a piece you liked, it kept the headline and the image, and the result was a visual board of things worth reading instead of a list of blue links. Ramy Adeeb, who had been a principal at Khosla Ventures before starting it, raised from Khosla along with True Ventures, and built a team of about ten.

Yahoo paid roughly $10 million in cash plus several million in earnouts tied to keeping the staff. All but one person moved over to work on social news under Marissa Mayer, who spent that period buying small teams at a steady clip. The product was not part of what Yahoo wanted, and it did not pretend otherwise.

~ the chronicle ~

~ thirty days to get your clippings out ~

Users had until 21 February 2013 to download their data. A month is generous by the standards of an acqui-hire, where the usual courtesy is a redirect and a thank-you page. It is also a very short window if you had spent a year building collections on a service you assumed would be there next year.

This is the part that keeps repeating across the whole clipping and bookmarking category. The value a user accumulates is the collection, and the collection is exactly the asset that has no value to an acquirer. Nobody bought Snip.it for the snips.

~ why it left no dent ~

TechCrunch's own coverage put it plainly at the time: the service had not picked up as much standalone traction as had been hoped. Fifteen months was not long enough to build the habit, and it landed in a crowded stretch when Pocket and Readability were teaching people different answers to the same question about saving things.

From here it barely registered at all, for reasons that are mostly arithmetic. A product with a small American user base and a fifteen-month life has no mechanism for reaching a reader in Ankara before it closes. I found it the way most people will, going backwards through a list of things Yahoo bought and switched off, where it sits between larger names that at least got a farewell page.

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