Online giant Yahoo wants to buy fast-growing photo messaging application Snapchat for $10 billion.
The Internet portal plans to shell out $10 billion to acquire Snapchat, mobile application that allows users to send photos, messages and video to 100 million users.
The deal with Snapchat will continue Yahoo's "acquisition spree" the past few months.
Yahoo has been busy the past few months in acquisitions of different venture-capital firms and companies.
Yahoo teamed up with Alibaba to get hold of 40 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant's stake back in 2005.
The investment cost Yahoo $1 billion, and earned the company over $5 billion. several times more than what they initially put out.
Just last month, Yahoo went on to buy several other companies including mobile messaging company MessageMe.
Now, Yahoo is set to buy the emerging photo messaging application, which earned $10 million in venture-capital funding as a way to give back to Yahoo's shareholders.
The Yahoo-Snapchat deal would be a game-changer for the aging Yahoo as a way to make its content, aps and ads available to mobile devices.
On the other hand, investing in Snapchat would reportedly be a big risk for yahoo as the 3-year old company is just starting to generate profits.
Another big company, Microsoft Corp., bought then newbie Facebook Inc. back in 2007 for $ 15 billion. The move proved to be successful, as it turned out on top of Google Inc. and increased its profits exponentially.
Yahoo is just one of the suitors of the mobile photo messaging startup, Snapchat.
Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers planned to invest $20 million in Snapchat back in May.
Alibaba also considered to join in and invest in Snapchat but then retracted.
Meanwhile, the deal would be a game-changer for Snapchat's Co-founder, Chief executive Evan Spiegel.
