Tumblr is a media company at the core. So it should work out well for Yahoo.
What exactly does that statement mean?
Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
41–50 of 120 posts
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#42Well, looking forward to the next Accidental Tech Podcast - should be very interesting to get Marco Arment's perspective on this. First Instapaper, now Tumblr. I wonder which will be a bigger deal for Marco... [Edit - I also wonder whether he had an inkling that these conversations were taking place. He has been discussing his tumblr roots a bit more than usual recently, including his undocumented podcast easteregg t…
Please note, I have zero inside information on this. Wikipedia attributes cofounder status to Marco[1]. Let's assume that he got a raw deal from Karp and had a potential 30% stake in the business. He worked on it for 3 years and 7 months. Let's just assume he fully vested (not quite accurate, but the math is easier). Over the course of five rounds of funding, maybe the final ownership stake of the founders was dilute…
David Karp has 25% of Tumblr [1], and makes it clear, that to start off with - it really was just David and Marco.
"...Marco Arment, Karp’s first and, for a long time, only employee at Tumblr."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr-...
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#43Isn't something really weird going on in the world when you can sell a company with almost no revenue (let alone profit) and no obvious business model in the horizon for $ 1.1B, or is it just me?
I'm with you - the perceived values of websites/businesses like this are astounding. Somehow founders and VCs walk away with a bunch of money after acquisitions, but what's Yahoo going to do? Seems like a large sum for an acqui-hire. Then again I'm a giant noob when it comes to startups, funding and acquisitions. Regardless, the numbers are out of this world.
Absolutely NOT an acqui-hire. $13mm in 2012 revenue, more than doubling in 2013... "In November it shouldered its way into the top ten online destinations, edging out Microsoft’s Bing and drawing nearly 170 million visitors to its galaxy of user-created pages, according to the measurement firm Quantcast. Tumblr’s tens of millions of registered users create 120,000 new blogs every day, for a total of 86 million and counting, which drive some 18 billion page views per month."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr-...
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
"how would they move that audience over to other Yahoo products?" The way the article is phrased (though we must remember it's third-hand at best) leads me to believe the strategy may be to go the other direction, to meld core Yahoo strengths (whatever that may be) into Tumblr. That is, integrate Yahoo offerings into Tumblr rather than the other way around.
Tumblr is ad inventory for Yahoo. Specifically, mobile ad inventory -- most of Tumblr's revenue comes from mobile ads. Mobile is a huge area of growth that Yahoo is anxious to stay on top of. They don't need Tumblr's audience to go anywhere other than Tumblr, and if they're smart they won't even try.
Just redirect the money hose to their own bucket. :)
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"how would they move that audience over to other Yahoo products?" The way the article is phrased (though we must remember it's third-hand at best) leads me to believe the strategy may be to go the other direction, to meld core Yahoo strengths (whatever that may be) into Tumblr. That is, integrate Yahoo offerings into Tumblr rather than the other way around.
how to do this without wrecking the tumble user experience is a huge challenge. One of the great things about tumblr timelines is information purity (and great curation by its users). iirc yahoo's strongest services are sports, news, finance, and mail. these would all seem to disrupt the feel and information purity of tumble if done carelessly. maybe encouraging sharing/linking and extrapolating on yahoo assets by me…
Would you say you've noticed how the YouTube user experience has changed over the past five years? I don't mean whether you like it personally or not, but whether the overall YT-as-site UX has been ruined in their acquisition by Google.
I think we're all inured a bit to site shutdowns through acquisitions, meaning that acq's have taken on a largely negative set of assumptions, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#46With tumblr as a curation hub and Flickr as a pool of images, maybe yahoo will next aquire a video pool (Vimeo?), a sound / music pool (soundcloud?) ... Having a small network of creative sites each with their own communities, tied by a single hub would be pretty cool.
Except that Flickr shows how poorly Yahoo will manage this acquisition. I feel sorry for all those Tumblr lovers that will see their favoured product ground down by mismanagement and neglect.
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#47Isn't something really weird going on in the world when you can sell a company with almost no revenue (let alone profit) and no obvious business model in the horizon for $ 1.1B, or is it just me?
If acquiring millions of users is so worthless, why don't we all have 100k+ monthly page views and fantastic engagement numbers? Or, put another way: put a dollar value on a speculative Yahoo effort to attract a user base the size and demographic composition of tumblr's. Don't forget to price in the risk of failure.
The point is, since when eyeballs started being worth so much? Isn't it proven already that users are like butterflies in the hand (you can't squeeze them, but let loose they fly away)? Myspace is there to prove that being king today doesn't say s* about your position in ten years. This year Facebook lost 1.4 million users, first deficit since launch.
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#48Yahoo needs a company like this to address two major issues. First, they lack a social offering. Second, they need to draw in more users, and I imagine Yahoo is hoping to bring over a large user base to their other products via integration with their ecosystem. If Yahoo does acquire tumbler, it will be interesting to see how they choose to integrate it (if they do at all).
Big-time integration would be a huge mistake. Look at how big of a lead on photography Flickr when Yahoo purchased them. After the purchased they were told to focus on integration. Flickr is a shadow of its former self
Integration wasn't the problem. It was the stagnant development in every other front that ruined Flickr.
Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#49Re: Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
#50Yahoo really needed a product to fill in that Geocities gap.