FollowSince the last week, rumors have been doing rounds that Yahoo will be purchasing Tumblr. The rumor has come true. On Sunday, the board of Yahoo declared that they will be the famous blogging service Tumblr. On early Monday, the news was made public. Yahoo will be buying Tumblr for 1.1 billion.
Tumblr fans are not really excited with Yahoo taking over Tumblr. They feel that the site will end up with plenty of ads from Yahoo. Last year, Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. However, Yahoo-Tumblr turns out to be largest acquisition when it comes to buying a social networking firm.
Marissa Mayer, who is working as chief executive for Yahoo stated that the deal is a great attempt to boost life into the firm. Tumblr has got more than 107 million blogs and most of the registered users on Tumblr are highly active.
Yahoo said that Tumblr will continue to work as separate business and David Karp who is the founder and CEO of Tumblr will continue to lead Tumblr. David assured Tumblr fans by saying that they won’t be making any changes in their team. He stated that the deal will only make Tumblr a better blogging service with more available resources.
Marissa assured her fans through Twitter that they need not worry about Tumblr as there will be no advertising of Yahoo on Tumblr. On the contrary, she also said that Yahoo will try to monetize on Tumblr in which will in turn deliver better user experience. Marissa claimed that it was Tumblr’s huge traffic and gripping content that made Yahoo to talk with Karp for the deal.
Let’s talk about Tumblr. It is one of the most popular microblogging service and social networking site. Every second more than 850 posts are made on Tumblr. It receives more than 300 million unique visitors every month and over 120,000 sign-ups happen every day. Even though it is one of the active social site on the web, the content present is not very suitable for adversiting.
The 300 million traffic from Tumblr can come very handy to Yahoo. It can immediately boost the traffic. It may happen so that when users on Tumblr access Yahoo, they will be able to see content that Tumblr knows users are interested in. As compared to Yahoo’s users, Tumblr users are young and have good knowledge about technology which makes it compelling for advertising.
Yahoo had previously acquired GeoCities for $4 billion in 1999 and it had also acquired Overture for 1.63 billion in 2003. In 2005, Yahoo had acquired Flickr but failed to make the best use of its social and mobile features. Finally, Flickr’s traffic went down rapidly.
The Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition will happen at the end of the year. Analysts feel that the financial status of Yahoo will not be affected by the deal this year.
