Yahoo Acquires Bread, and Now the URL Shortener Is Toast

Yahoo has acquired Bread, a URL shortener whose links included interstitial ads designed by the person who shortened them. The service has shut down as of Friday in the wake of the deal.

Bread (aka "Bre.ad") posted the news on its website this evening. Although the service and its products — Bread Social and Bread Oven — have been shut down, all shortened Bread URLs will remain active until Nov. 11, CEO Alan Chan wrote. Before that date, he recommended any publishers replace Bread links with ones from Bitly.

Bread's staff will get baked into Yahoo's advertising team in Sunnyvale, Calif., Chan wrote, where they'll work on "developing next-generation solutions for social and mobile publishers and advertisers." It's not known what the terms of the deal were or how much money was exchanged, although TechCrunch reports that Bread had raised $3.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2011. Bread's company page on LinkedIn lists 16 employees. Read more...