Sure, but that's not really a model, right? (Sorry, not to attack you.) I really hope the MBAs on the M&A team for Yahoo! didn't just say "Well, we used to be c

Sure, but that's not really a model, right? (Sorry, not to attack you.) I really hope the MBAs on the M&A team for Yahoo! didn't just say "Well, we used to be cool, but we're not anymore, so.." Tumblr was growing, but it was extremely young (read: low HHI, difficult to target, resistant to advertising) and extremely brand un-safe (read: impossible to monetize). So they had to believe one of four things: 1. The brand would grow into an older demographic, despite being not designed as such 2. Users would not leave in mass once brand-safety initiatives were to be put in place and/or advertisers wouldn't care 3. Some other business model would emerge, despite that not happening to almost any other similar consumer product ever 4. Display advertising would reverse the trend of CPMs plummeting and being sucked up by Facebook and Google I can't imagine any competent M&A analyst actually looking at Tumblr and the state of the Internet ultimately believing any of them, which is why the deal was hugely baffling then.