- 01The product: one place to research products, compare prices and click through to a retailer.
- 02The bill: $37.2 million in disclosed funding. The 2014 sale price was never made public.
- 03The first failure: growth stalled after the company reached roughly $50 million in revenue and 150 employees.
- 04The useful copy: treat research and purchase as different jobs, then make the handoff measurable.
There were two buttons on Become.com, and the whole company lived in the space between them. One said Research. The other said Shop. This was 2005, when online retail still behaved like an enormous warehouse whose labels had fallen off. Search for a digital camera and you might need a review, a model number, a price, a trustworthy merchant and the patience to discover that these things lived on different pages.
Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun believed the shopping web needed its own index. They were not naïve about comparison shopping. The pair had already created mySimon, one of the category’s early successes, and sold it to CNET in 2000 for about $700 million. Their second act began in 2004, initially under the name Exava, with a more ambitious proposition: do not merely tell shoppers where an item is cheapest. Help them decide what the item should be.
A search engine for the indecisive moment
Become’s crawler narrowed the web to shopping-related information. Its AIR system - Affinity Index Ranking - tried to elevate useful buying guides, professional reviews, manufacturer pages and product discussion. By April 2005, the company said it had indexed 3.2 billion pages from more than 40 million websites. It even built spelling correction around the peculiar language of commerce: brand names, model numbers and the alphanumeric soup that ordinary dictionaries treat as mistakes.
The distinction mattered. A person asking “Which camera is right for low light?” is not yet the same customer as the person asking “Who has the Canon A720IS in stock?” Become designed for both, but kept the jobs visible. Research built confidence. Shop converted confidence into a merchant click.
“The articles that our site makes available help to create context for surfers and help them make buying decisions.”Michael Yang, at the 2005 beta launch
The click was the merchandise
Become did not carry a single sofa or camera. Its inventory was intent. Retailers supplied catalogs and bids. The site organized offers, reviews and filters. A shopper clicked through to a merchant, and Become earned advertising or referral revenue. In the cleanest version of the model, everybody left with something: the shopper got a shorter decision, the retailer got a qualified visitor, and Become got paid for the introduction.
This was also the source of the company’s practical expertise. Product feeds are fussy. A vague title, a missing availability field or two columns that both seem to mean “price” can bury a good item or break an entire upload. Become added channel management, feed optimization and analytics, then pushed product ads beyond its own pages through a network reported to include more than 500 publishers. The company was becoming less like a destination and more like plumbing.
For merchants, the promise was traffic that had already done some homework. For publishers, it was a way to turn product interest into revenue. For shoppers, it remained free. That combination placed Become among comparison engines such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and NexTag, but its research index was the point of difference. Amazon and eBay were destination marketplaces. Google’s Froogle sat inside a much larger discovery machine. Become tried to own the thoughtful interval before either.
More products, more countries, more surfaces
The company expanded with the confidence of a search startup that had found its lane. In 2006, Yang said monthly use had grown from about 10,000 during beta to more than 1.5 million. By 2008, comScore figures cited in the press put annual traffic growth at 260 percent. Become raised $17.5 million from TPG Growth that March and another $8 million from European Founders Fund in July, bringing disclosed funding to $37.2 million.
Its geography became as distinctive as its index. Operations stretched across the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Japan and the Philippines. More than 70 percent of revenue was reported outside the United States. When the company launched an iPad app, it offered more than 25 million products in over 800 categories from 3,000-plus retailers. A feature called ShopTop could even place a sofa over a picture of the shopper’s room. The execution looks quaint now only because the idea survived.
The footprint Connexity wanted
The bill arrived from Google
The awkward fact about comparison engines was that many had to buy attention from general search engines. The more a middleman paid Google or Yahoo for a visitor, the less margin remained when that visitor clicked onward to a store. Meanwhile, Google could put its own product results directly in front of the shopper, and Amazon could persuade the shopper to begin inside its marketplace. Become’s technology could make an answer better. It could not make distribution free.
Yang had noticed the cultural change from the dot-com years early. Investors no longer rewarded size without substance. Revenue and profit mattered. The cheaper Dell servers, Linux and MySQL that reduced the cost of building the product did not remove the cost of acquiring an audience. In a recent retrospective, Yang supplied the plainest ending: Become grew to roughly $50 million in revenue and about 150 employees worldwide, then stopped growing. A startup that stops growing, he observed, loses the premise on which its value rests.
Connexity acquired Become in December 2014. The price was not disclosed. What Connexity said about the deal was more revealing than a number might have been: it wanted Become’s reach. Roughly half of Become’s business was in Europe, one quarter in the US and one quarter in Japan. Connexity already had comparison brands and performance-marketing technology. Become brought more merchants, more publishers and a new Japanese foothold.
Seven years later, Taboola acquired Connexity as a whole for approximately $753 million. That is not Become’s exit price, and it should not be mistaken for one. It does show where the surviving logic went. The old shopping engine became one layer in a larger open-web commerce system: merchants supplying products, publishers supplying attention, and software trying to match the two outside the largest closed platforms.
The part worth stealing
Copy the two buttons, metaphorically. A customer who is learning and a customer who is choosing are in adjacent stages, not identical ones. Give research users context and vocabulary. Give purchase users comparable fields, live availability and a clear next action. Measure the handoff. Become’s most durable insight was that better-prepared shoppers can be more valuable traffic.
Copy the feed discipline too. Marketplace quality is often a data-cleaning problem wearing a glossy interface. Standardize titles. Define one canonical price. Reject stale availability. Ask partners what failed before launch, not after a catalog disappears. These are unglamorous decisions, which is why they compound.
The model becomes fragile when customer acquisition depends on a platform that can copy the feature, raise traffic prices or insert its own answer above yours. It also strains when merchant data is stale, when too few sellers make comparisons meaningful, or when consumers already begin at a dominant marketplace. Become’s history is not an argument against specialized search. It is an argument for owning at least one scarce input - proprietary supply, direct audience, distinctive data or distribution that cannot be repriced overnight.
Become.com began with an elegant belief: shopping deserved a search engine built for shopping. It ended up proving a harsher and more useful one. On the commercial web, the ranking algorithm is only half the machine. The other half is the route by which someone arrives.