• GigaOm , Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:30 AM

Ahead of Yahoo's earnings, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster opined, in a research note, that the struggling Web portal should consider buying the struggling New York Times Co. and Nick Denton's Gawker Media. "These content acquisitions would allow Yahoo to own and distribute a collection of the best content on the Web in addition to generating short-form content to maximize page views and stickiness," he wrote. Other suggestions included selling Yahoo Search to Microsoft and acquiring a microblogging service like FriendFeed.

Yahoo buying The New York Times Co. is a crazy suggestion, writes GigaOm's Mathew Ingram. "With all due respect to Munster, rattling off a bunch of names as possible acquisitions doesn't amount to a realistic strategy for the company at this point." Sure, Yahoo needs quality content, he says, which is something The New York Times definitely has, and it could also stand to get more "bloggy" and "social", "but isn't this just going to spread Yahoo's peanut butter even thinner" Ingram asks?

Buying The New York Times Co. doesn't make sense because, for starters, Yahoo already gets to aggregate content from the Times and other pubs through Yahoo News. It also enjoys special relationships with several newspapers, so what benefits would The Times Co. provide? It's not as if the paper is making "boatloads of cash, or producing content that Yahoo can't get by other means," Ingram says, "and buying the Times could actually make it harder for Yahoo to strike deals with other content providers, which would actually put the company further behind. An acquisition makes no sense whatsoever. Sorry, Gene."

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