AOL Gets Into Q&A Business, Acquires Israel's Yedda

I first met Yedda founders Avichay Nissenbaum and Yaniv Golan during a trip to Israel in February 2006. The company, which hosts a question and answer service that is similar in some ways to Yahoo Answers, launched later that year.

Tonight they’re announcing their acquisition by AOL. Terms are not being disclosed. The current plan, says Yedda, is to keep the company as an independent business operating from its current location in Tel Aviv with the current team. They will gradually integrate it into the AOL properties.

Yedda has evolved significantly since last year. They still compete directly with Yahoo and others, but they also partner with others to power independent Q&A services as well. There are more than fifty partners working with Yedda now – example partners are ePals and TheJobNetwork. Yedda says those partners now drive 90% of their total traffic.

The company, which has raised $2.5 million in venture capital, is still small but growing rapidly. Comscore shows a big jump in usage since the summer, from 215,000 unique users in June to nearly 800,000 last month (see above, this does not count partner traffic).