Associated Content Acquired by Yahoo! - Good News or Bad News?

I'm currently on about page 7 of a 23 page (so far) thread on the Associated Content forums, sparked by the news that Yahoo has bought AC. The posters so far appear to be seperated into two camps; the panicked, who worry that the buyout will bring Bad Things to their favorite content publisher, and the cynical, who are sure it will. The moderators are curiously quiet, but if you believe the press releases, AC blog and FAQ, we're about to enter a period of enlightment, eternal youth and world peace.

I personally don't quite know what to think. I'm no fondness for Yahoo; they're certainly no Google. But, as my wife pointed out, on the plus side, they're no AOL either. Or, dog forbid, MSN. There are certainly worse companies to be bought by. I've seen some of Yahoo's other content written by its users, like Yahoo Answers. You'd have to dive as low as the comments on Youtube to find as large a collection of people you wouldn't trust to put on a pair of trousers unsupervised. On the plus side, there's an awful lot of them, and their page hits are worth just as much as anyone elses.

There's also a lot of consternation about the last line of a news story on Yahoo suggesting they intend to close the AC site as soon as they finish acquiring it. This is backed up nowhere else, and to me, just seems to be badly worded. I find it hard to believe that a corporation would spend actual, real money to purchase a brandname like AC with the intent of just closing it down, or merging it into their own brand any time soon. If they wanted Yahoo Content, they could easily have started their own version of this without buying an existing site.

I'm slightly miffed that this gets announced right at the time when I appear to have finally figured out how to get my pageviews from being about 50 a day to several orders of magnitude higher. That's just me not liking having my goalposts moved, though, especially when I'm told the goalposts won't be moving at all. Except that they will, and they don't know quite how much and where yet.

For the moment, I'm going to just carry on doing what I was doing before, and get my payments while I can. The future, I'm reserving judgement on for now.