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Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

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Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#41
It would be bad karma to accept a $1 billion offer from Yahoo.

Previously Yahoo have made tree $1 billion offers, one to each of eBay, Google and Facebook. All where turned down, and for all it turned out to be the right ting to do[0].

0: http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-...

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#42

I see a lot of people talking about Tumblr's userbase rather than the quality and potential profitibility of this userbase. As someone who has worked in brand management at P&G, i do not see any major consumer brand who's personality fits with lol cats and porn, therefore which major brand are you going to find to put ads next to that crap. Secondly lets take a look at the demographics and LSM's, tumblr is mainly mad…

This problem plagues most social networks, but at the end of the day, scale and proper scale management solves the brand problems you've mentioned.

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#43
Just because Tumblr is an established platform with a lot of users doesn't make it worth one billion dollars. Who are they kidding? Yahoo! is offering them more money than the service which will be a nightmare to correctly monetise is worth.

Considering Tumblr is a waste dump of animated GIF's and memes it's only a matter of time before something new and hip comes along and Tumblr becomes another Geocities.

Remember Geocities? Yahoo! paid 4.6 billion for it back in 1998 and then it lagged behind and got shut down. 4.6 billion down the drain, Tumblr will be the next Geocities and the novelty of a free blogging platform all the hipsters used to use before something cooler and new came along will wear off like Myspace when Facebook took off.

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#44
post #5

Here's my perspective as a hardcore tumblr user - Tumblr is a good example of an 'uncontrolled platform'. What started as a beautiful blogging platform, has now turned into a junkyard of cat memes, 'blurr-photo-in-the-background' quotes and animated GIF thumbnails of movie snapshots and softcore pornography. Of course your feed depends on what/who you subscribe to..but due to the nature of Tumblr's platform, even the…

Actually, Instagram turned out to be a fantastic deal. Many thought it was over-valued at the time but Instagram has passed 100 million active users early this year and users spend more time on Instagram than they do on Twitter (or practically any other app than Facebook or email). In retrospect, I think $1 Billion was a steal.

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#45
post #38
post #18

Has there ever been an acquisition similar to Tumblr (company that has existed for 5+ years that hasn't found a profitable business model) which has contributed positively to the acquirer's net income? Is there any chance that this cannot turn out to be a boondoggle, because that seems to be the consensus among the commenters on HN.

YouTube. Possibly Reddit? Personally I find that in the end, the question should be: can Yahoo! make better use of the $1B elsewhere? If not, the purchase is worth taking the chance.

Reddit was, at least recently, in the red.

However, Conde Nast no longer owns Reddit directly, so Reddit has no effect on Conde Nast's net income (only their shared parent company's).

Also, in Reddit's case, an argument can be made that it's a 'loss leader' - it may be operating in the red, but the value it adds to their portfolio of publications as a whole justifies the cost.

(Consider, for example, the alternative: shutting down an unprofitable Reddit, at which point all the users flock to the "next" discussion website which they don't own and control.)

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#47
It makes makes me sad that tumblr is even considering selling to yahoo. I found Tumblr useful as a simple blogging platform in which other users could "vote" on content they liked.

Someone should build a straight up reddit-for-blogs.

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#48
post #44
post #5

Here's my perspective as a hardcore tumblr user - Tumblr is a good example of an 'uncontrolled platform'. What started as a beautiful blogging platform, has now turned into a junkyard of cat memes, 'blurr-photo-in-the-background' quotes and animated GIF thumbnails of movie snapshots and softcore pornography. Of course your feed depends on what/who you subscribe to..but due to the nature of Tumblr's platform, even the…

Actually, Instagram turned out to be a fantastic deal. Many thought it was over-valued at the time but Instagram has passed 100 million active users early this year and users spend more time on Instagram than they do on Twitter (or practically any other app than Facebook or email). In retrospect, I think $1 Billion was a steal.

They could have a billion active users and would still have $0 in revenue. I don't see how it's a steal.

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#49
post #38
post #18

Has there ever been an acquisition similar to Tumblr (company that has existed for 5+ years that hasn't found a profitable business model) which has contributed positively to the acquirer's net income? Is there any chance that this cannot turn out to be a boondoggle, because that seems to be the consensus among the commenters on HN.

YouTube. Possibly Reddit? Personally I find that in the end, the question should be: can Yahoo! make better use of the $1B elsewhere? If not, the purchase is worth taking the chance.

Neither YouTube or Reddit fit the bill. Both of those companies were created in 2005 and then sold in 2006. I would argue that they were still in a user acquisition phase instead of trying to monetize their platforms. 5 years is a long time to run without figuring out how you are going to become profitable. Tumblr was created in 2007 and has a lot of smart people working there, why haven't they figured out how to make money in the past 6 years?

Re: Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”

#50
post #39
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress supports Post by email: Self-hosted: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email WordPress.com: http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-by-email/

thanks for the information. I never knew wordpress emails support adding tags like tumblr up to now. It was really helpful. The reason I switched from wordpress to tumblr is wordpress started displaying ads on my blog as they do with some blogs at some times. But if yahoo buy tumblr should consider switching to wordpress or blogger or some self hosting platform

But why? Why just consider switching? Why not wait to see what, if anything, actually changes? And if those changes are for the better? You had a valid reason switching from Wordpress to Tumblr, but you don't provide one from switching away.

There is so much angst from the teenage users using Tumblr that are panicking about the buyout and making similar threats. I don't expect to see that mentality without sound reasoning on HN.

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