The book­mark­ing web­site, Deli­cious, is to be sold for the third time in ten years when the founders of YouTube sell it on to Sci­ence Inc.

The his­to­ry of Delicious

Deli­cious was cre­at­ed back in 2003 and allows users to add a dig­i­tal book­mark to online sites of inter­est, as well as stor­ing select­ed links. It was first sold to Yahoo in 2005, but they were dis­ap­point­ed by its poor growth and sold it on five years lat­er to Steve Chen and Chad Hur­ley, the founders of the huge­ly suc­cess­ful video web­site, YouTube.

Chen and Hur­ley were opti­mistic about the book­mark­ing site, upgrad­ing ele­ments of the web­site and hop­ing to inno­vate it. They were rea­son­ably suc­cess­ful, ini­tial­ly gain­ing around 200,000 new users a month. How­ev­er, the book­mark­ing site’s posi­tion as a niche ser­vice meant that it would only ever appeal to a rel­a­tive few, and they now want to con­cen­trate their atten­tion on devel­op­ing a new video app called MixBit for their com­pa­ny, Avos.

The future for Delicious

So Deli­cious changes hands once again, this time to Sci­ence Inc., a tech­nol­o­gy and con­sul­tan­cy com­pa­ny head­ed by Michael Jones, a for­mer Myspace chief exec­u­tive. The details of the sale have not been made pub­lic but it has been con­firmed that it does not include any of the exist­ing Deli­cious staff.

Mr. Jones has announced that he intends to leave Deli­cious for the most part as it is, but he will be mak­ing some minor changes, such as remov­ing the adver­tis­ing that cur­rent­ly appears on the site. He said, “They’ve got an immense amount of data and an incred­i­ble under­stand­ing of what is trend­ing on the web. At the end of the day, we think they serve this real­ly unique com­mu­ni­ty as a dai­ly utility.”

Deli­cious is the first acqui­si­tion in Sci­ence Inc.’s plan to build a new port­fo­lio which is tar­get­ed towards mobile and data con­tent. They have pre­vi­ous­ly pro­vid­ed finan­cial back­ing to a dog-sit­ting ser­vice, Dog­Va­cay, and Shave Club, a shav­ing prod­ucts com­pa­ny avail­able to sub­scribers. Mr. Jones is tak­ing a chance on the book­mark­ing site, hop­ing to inject new vig­or into Deli­cious and make it suc­cess­ful despite its history.