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.
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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.
Through the customizable pages -- called "Toasts" -- that users could attach to links, Bread aimed to help publishers and social media influencers monetize their content, Chan wrote. Basic Toasts with a couple of images were free to use, but in 2012 the service began testing a premium product, Bread Pro, that let users build media-rich billboards.
Picking up Bread is just the latest in a series of acquisitions by Yahoo since Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, fueling her effort to re-assert the aging Web 1.0 giant as a product company. Earlier this year, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for more than $1 billion, but it's also bought several much smaller companies, including a news aggregator built by a 17-year-old boy.