Tumblr

Compared to revenue, hosting cost is next to nothing for sites like Tumblr that serve text/image content. A similar video site would need to spend a ton of money on bandwidth, streaming CDNs, encoding servers, etc.

If you get 2.5 million hits a month, it is certainly possible to cover the said selling price of $3m in ads alone in a month.

Given that Yahoo never figured out how to turn search into a business, that speaks volumes of their ability to connect dots.

I was at Yahoo until just before the sale to Verizon, which happened because the first attempt at spinning off the Alibaba shares tax-free failed. In the first attempt, Yahoo created a new company called Aabaco, which super conveniently could reasonably apply for the stock ticker AABA. (Alibaba had BABA)

When the first attempt failed, they needed an ALTernative solution, so they sold the core business to Verizon, and promptly renamed the company from Yahoo to Altaba and changed their stock ticker from YHOO to AABA.

Meanwhile, the press were super confused about the name change and there were a bunch of articles with people speculating on the name change, wondering what the name meant, etc, etc, because noone apparently could imagine that the name change was exactly as lazy and uninspired and dumb as it was.

I am pretty sure the OATH name was thought up by the same fine minds, and that it was equally uninspired and dumb. If you and your colleagues inside Verizon smelled corporate bullshit, I think that just strengthens my case.

Twitter sucks for lots of reasons, but a big one for me is that it's really tough to follow a 'genre' or topic because so few people stick to tweeting about one genre or related genres.

I only really ever used twitter to follow small(ish) tweeters and a few corporate brand accounts that weren't interactive anyway. The brand accounts never responded to anything anyone wrote to them, so twitter is, in effect, just a newsletter delivery service for them so they got filtered off into their own list. I tried following a few prolific tweeters, but I got tired of checking my feed and the prolific tweeters completely drowning out everyone else I followed. The small tweeters were more interactive (they would actually respond to things I would @ them once in a while) but they usually posted in topics all over the place. I might have followed them because someone else I follow retweeted something that I was interested in on a particular topic, video games, say, but after following them for a while, it turned out that they veer off into politics or the economy or mental health issues or racism or some other realm. Not to say that those aren't important things, but they're not the thing I was following them for, and it cluttered up the feed with things that I wasn't interested in looking at that day.

Twitter would have been a lot more useful to me if I could somehow follow topics instead of people. Yes, I know about Tweetdeck and lists and hashtags, but that presumes that I want to bother continually setting up those things as the conversations flow and evolve, or that I'm following the correct hashtag or term (e.g. I was following #widget3a and most of the interesting conversations happen with #3awidget so I missed the whole thing), or that people manage to tag their tweets appropriately, et cetera.

Yahoo wrote down almost the entire value of Tumblr before the Verizon acquisition[0]

> What kind of business, let alone web business, sells for 1/10th annual revenue?

A business that is losing a lot of money and shrinking. Automattic have to invest a lot more than $3M to keep Tumblr alive and turn it around (200 employees) - the total investment isn't just the acquisition cost

With the headline figure it might seem like a nobrainer but Automattic could end up spending years investing in a turnaround that never happens

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/yahoo-tumblr-write-down-2...