Inevitable, today a big news hit us: Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Just one day before Microsoft’s Xbox event, we have something to discuss about. When you first read the official announcement made by Marissa Mayer, you instantly feel something strange: “We promise not to screw it up”. Oh, not again.
Yahoo acquired Tumblr and so it inherits 109.0 million blogs. What will they do with them, especially with porn based blogs. In an interview given to the WSJ, Yahoo CEO said that “companies will find ways to surface Tumblr’s unique content on Yahoo’s sites”.Marissa Mayer also said today that buying Tumblr boosts Yahoo’s user base by 50% to 1 billion, and Web traffic by 20%” which proves Yahoo wants now more visibility than ever. All those small clues indicate the same thing: Yahoo is preparing to launch something big or maybe they want to redefine themselves. I assume that an advertising network is also on the table for Yahoo, considering the immense database Tumblr has and the business relations Yahoo has with huge brands. In 2012 Tumblr made $13 million in advertising last year.
Besides advertising Yahoo could do another thing with Tumblr. They could actually let them grow and develop their ideas alone and just help them monetize their content better. Another cool thing they could do, would be to import on Yahoo website some of Tumblr’s best blog-posts. There are a lot of good things to do, but Yahoo needs to act smart because Tumblr has huge potential to go down, if something bad happens. Imagine what could happen if Yahoo will start censoring Tumblr users when they’ll add a photo or a video.
In the end I personally hope Tumblr will not end like Geocities, Del.icio.us, Flickr and so on. Right now, Tumblr is an interesting place for everybody and I hope, like Marissa Mayer hopes that Yahoo will not crush it. Tumblr users reacted quickly after the acquisition was made official and most of them didn’t liked what happened. Some hope Yahoo will not turn Tumblr into another MySpace while others don’t want to lose their Tumblr community/friends or the right to upload NSFW content.
David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, said:
Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo! and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.
