IAC-owned social network Ask.fm has acquired the entire team behind recipe network Foodily, the companies are announcing today, which includes those focused on product, engineering, and design. These nine team members will now be tasked with the continued development of Ask.fm’s Q&A platform, while the Foodily website and mobile app will be maintained by a separate division within IAC.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Foodily had raised $7.7 million in outside funding from Index Ventures and others since its founding back in 2010.
The new team members will join Ask.fm in both its Oakland and Latvia locations, Ask.com says in a brief announcement.
Foodily itself has little crossover with what Ask.fm does today in terms of overall theme. Foodily offers a social network for discovering and sharing favorite recipes with others, which can also be organized into collections by its users.
It’s not surprising that the service was in need of an exit, given that social bookmarking site Pinterest is now the current favorite way that users are grouping and sharing their online finds, which very often includes recipes. In fact, the writing was on the wall for Foodily years ago, when it revamped its product focus more on social features just as recipe-sharing on Pinterest was exploding.
Meanwhile, beleaguered social network Ask.fm, which IAC bought up last year following its struggles with cyberbullying and teen suicide, has been investing in making its platform a safer place for online users since its transition. The company grew its moderation team by 40% since IAC’s Ask.com bought it, and rolled out a number of enhancements to increase user loyalty and engagement, the company says. One feature called “People You May Know,” launched two weeks ago, and has seen 15 million Ask.fm engage with in its first seven days, the company notes.
In total, Ask.fm reports having 150 million active users.
But while the two sites haven’t been focused on the same niche – one does recipes, the other Q&A – they both fit into the larger category of social networking. For Ask.fm, this deal means the chance to bring in new talent that can help it improve its social aspects and design. (Foodily once won a Webby award for its magazine-style layout, for example.)
Foodily explains how the transition will affect users by way of a blog post today, which says the transition of the website and mobile app to IAC’s Mindspark team will take place over the next 30 days. Users who visit Foodily will be asked to login and confirm their account in order to keep their faved recipes and lists – and they’ll need to do so by May 30th, in order to ensure their content makes the move. Afterward, the site will continue to function as usual.
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