The exits of Buddy Media and Wildfire are related to Facebook introducing Timeline to Pages. If you assume they were notified of the change in early 2012, and

The exits of Buddy Media and Wildfire are related to Facebook introducing Timeline to Pages. If you assume they were notified of the change in early 2012, and the change happened in March/April, and a deal of this size taking a few months to close, you can see how this deal (and the Buddy Media one) are likely directly related. The change also coincides with WF and BM both announcing ad-related pivots the day before Facebook announced their Timeline change (source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wildfire-announces-new-capabilities-to-optimize-new-facebook-mobile-experience-2012-02-29 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wildfire-announces-new-capa... and http://www.marketwatch.com/story/buddy-media-announces-brighter-option-acquisition-adds-paid-advertising-solution-to-social-enterprise-software-suite-2012-02-27 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/buddy-media-announces-brigh...). The Pages change destroyed many companies. The week that the change was forced, I took a screen shot of the top app losers on socialbakers. Check it out yourself: http://i.imgur.com/C3zSQ.png http://i.imgur.com/C3zSQ.png . BandPage, for example, lost 90% of its traffic in 60 days. Wildfire apps saw their user base gutted as well. I remember looking up the stats for a few of their apps a month later and saw their app install base had fallen huge double digit percentages. It's hard to see exactly how companies like WF were impacted, but I think the Timeline change gutted their unstoppable growth and forced them to exit while things were still looking bright. And this, in my opinion, helps explain why they took a relatively small exit of $250M (given the larger $689M of BM). That's my guess at the situation. ( Edit: The reason I have this info handy is because I looked into this in depth a few months back: http://www.michikono.com/2012/03/22/facebook-is-okay-with-hurting-their-developers/ http://www.michikono.com/2012/03/22/facebook-is-okay-with-hu... )