4 ms·
Yahoo derailed Tumblr? Ok, sure. Just remember where it was when Yahoo acquired it.. $13m in revenue and $25m in expenses for 2012 (net loss of $12m for the ye
by rgbrenner 10y ago
Yahoo derailed Tumblr? Ok, sure.
Just remember where it was when Yahoo acquired it.. $13m in revenue and $25m in expenses for 2012 (net loss of $12m for the year). With $125m raised, and $114m of debt on the books.
Yahoo acquired them just a few months after they announced these results for 2012.
It's easy to blame Yahoo for Tumblr's problems.. but Tumblr wasn't Twitter or Instagram. It was a tiny business (in comparison).. that without Yahoo very well could have been out of business by now.
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-tumblrs-total-revenue-for-2012-and-how-it-will-make-a-profit-in-2013-2013-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-tumblrs-total-revenue-f...
- niftich 10y agoContext is important. Tumblr had a lot of porn blogs, sure, but most people on it were 15-25-year-olds running personal blogs, interest blogs, and building communities. It was essentially the new Livejournal, but with Twitter-style reblogs. Yahoo knew this, and wanted this demographic for their ad ecosystem. They often thought of themselves as a 'media company', and they liked the creative aspects of the community. They also, wisely, knew that Tumblr users would never accept being forced into using a Yahoo account, so they had to keep the userbases separate. But this meant they couldn't use Tumblr to build Yahoo's social presence and its brand. They'd harvest some analytics, display some very loosely targeted ads to people highly averse to ads, but that mercantilist relationship was all was to be. In that light, they clearly overspent.
- harryf 10y agoBut now it's 2016 and services like Tumblr have all gone mobile but Yahoo is killing the Tumblr app by requiring a login as I've explained before here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071841