In July, Yahoo IP Holdings sold the domain name TUAW.com, used by The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) started by Weblogs Inc. in 2004. The acquisition was made by an ad agency called Web Orange.
The agency recently rolled out the TUAW.com web site afresh by using allegedly scraped or plagiarized content from news sources such as Apple Insider, “signed” by AI personas as article editors; the “zombified” content bears little resemblance to the human-written content that TUAW once provided to its readers.
Here’s a brief history of The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and how the domain arrived in the hands of Yahoo, sellers of the domain TUAW.com:
Just a year after its launch, TUAW was one of the most popular destinations for news and rumors about Apple and its products. Weblogs Inc. was sold to AOL for a reported $25 million in October 2005.
In 2011, following AOL’s $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post, the former Weblogs Inc blogs, along with TechCrunch and many of AOL’s other content brands, were reorganized under a new division called the Huffington Post Media Group.
In February 2015, TUAW was shut down and folded into Engadget. Mere months later, AOL was acquired by Verizon.
In 2017, AOL’s content business, along with that of Yahoo!, which was also acquired by Verizon, were combined into a new media subsidiary called Oath Inc.
In May 2021, Verizon announced that Verizon Media would be acquired by Apollo Global Management for $5 billion and would simply be known as Yahoo following the closure of the deal, with Verizon retaining a minor 10% stake in the new group. The acquisition was completed on September 1, 2021, with the company now known as Yahoo.
Moral of the story: A domain name asset might survive corporate mergers and acquisitions; with the current use of AI as a provocative creator of rehashed content, such domains can get resurrected—not always for the best.
