8 ms·
Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr
- dm8 13y agoTumblr is a media company at the core. So it should work out well for Yahoo.
- hkmurakami 13y agoI just hope they don't do crap like interspersing yahoo news or yahoo sports stuff into timelines following those kinds of themes. please don't make the product suck by jamming yahoo products that don't match the tumble user ecotone.
- aswanson 13y agoWhat exactly does that statement mean?
- OGC 13y agoNothing > Tumblr is a media company at the core. Tumblr is a glorified blog hoster.
- Apocryphon 13y agoIf this goes through, it may be amusing to see Yahoo doing better in the social space than Google (is with G+). Tumblr seems like a very wild, organic community that is its own social network. If Yahoo treats it the way Conde Nast has with reddit, it could turn out to be quite the boon for them.
- stanleydrew 13y agoDo you think Conde Nast believes reddit has been a boon for them?
- staunch 13y agoOf course. They could sell it tomorrow for a nice multiple. They bought it for like $15 million and could easily sell it for $100+ million.
- parfe 13y agoConde Nast hasn't owned Reddit since 2011.
- hkmurakami 13y agoit's becoming a force of its own, influencing other sites to follow it and setting trends and attitudes. 2chan is a massive social force in Japan. and reedit is following in its doorsteps and on a path of bigger things.
- bangsta 13y agoThis will be the first big test of Marissa Mayer, to buy a significant property and leverage it without destroying its user base in the process. If Tumblr is rebranded in purple, it will all be over. I wish Yahoo the best in the endeavor, but their track record in acquisitions is not good.
- robryan 13y agoIf this does happen it will be very interesting to see Tumblr's progress over the next year. Will give insight into whether Yahoo has turned the corner or whether it is the same Yahoo we have seen in the past 5 years.
- sdoowpilihp 13y agoAgressive acquisitions such as this one are already signaling change at the company. The real question is whether that change is meaningful in terms of acquiring users and maximizing profits.
- AtTheLast 13y agoYahoo seems to be making a lot of the right moves in terms of product design and development talent. I think they have a good chance of being able to help monitize Tumblr in a way that doesn't ruin the user experience. Like you said, this will be a true test for the new Yahoo.
- ghshephard 13y agoWell, 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 that he built into tumblr, and the fact that the tumblr source code was open source, but not public, which allowed Marco to use it for future endeavors... Edit 2: And this little hint from his Blog on May 11th. "I ended up joining Davidville instead, for less money, because David would let me work on a brand new Mac with any keyboard I wanted and more than three feet of desk space. A few months later, we started Tumblr. Turned out to be the right move. " ]
- hkmurakami 13y agobigger personal/professional deal - instapaper (full ownership and design of product, years w. the product, etc.) bigger monetary deal - tumblr hands down
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoPlease 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 diluted from 100% to 10%[2]. Marco owns 3% of the company, and walks away with a hair over $30 million pre-tax. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Arment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Arment [2] Handy infographic: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-how-dilution-affects-you-at-a-startup/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-...
- hkmurakami 13y agoeven if he were a "first hire" and only had 1/10 that equity hell still get $3mm pretax; nothing to laugh at.
- sdoowpilihp 13y agoYahoo 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).
- hkmurakami 13y agonot only is the integration interesting, is by far the most challenging and critical thing they have to do with tumblr. in fact, they can't afford to mess this up. iirc there are already new blogging startups that are trying to unseat tumble as the social blogging king.
- nosrac 13y agoBig-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
- eterm 13y agoFor the first time in 6 or 7 years I didn't renew my Flickr sub this year. It's not just that I've grown older, it's that fundamentally Flickr no longer delivers the content and community, and blame for that must lie at Yahoo's door and their failure to innovate with photo.
- aswanson 13y agoBingo. That 'integration' impulse by big companies is the death-knell for a product. Better off to leave a successful product alone.
- Pxtl 13y agoIntegration wasn't the problem. It was the stagnant development in every other front that ruined Flickr.
- citricsquid 13y agoIf the deal goes through Yahoo would now own the Tumblr audience, so Yahoo would have a product with a young audience, the audience Marissa Mayer wants for Yahoo, however, how would they move that audience over to other Yahoo products? An acquisition of Tumblr seems very much like the acquisition of reddit by Advance Publications. They both have huge audiences that are passionate and growing fast but have great difficulty monetising their audiences effectively and are providing no real value to the parent company (other than the potential for the sites to become profitable). If Yahoo bought Tumblr how would they ever convert the audience into Yahoo users? I guess it comes down to: what value is there to any company in "owning" an audience if that audience has no interest in becoming the audience of the parent and will actively resist it? People would get very angry if AP started pushing their ownership of reddit onto reddit users, having Wired articles automatically frontpaged, things like that would drive everyone away, how will Yahoo avoid that?
- hkmurakami 13y agoyou've just described Facebook for me (relative to the services fb wants me to use)
- mbell 13y agoI think the (possible) acquisition means a lot more for Yahoo's ability to attract talent than it does for the business bottom line. Probably the same thing, but only in the longer term. If they acquire tumblr and shut it down, or make changes that result in a receding of the user base, then they are unlikely to acquire talent. If they acquire tumblr and improve it, they will improve they position in the talent acquisition market.
- hkmurakami 13y agoeven better would be to keep tumblr a separate entity like slideshare and LinkedIn and really sell that fact to recruits. slide share stresses their small company dynamic +big company resources, and I think that's an attractive proposition for many.
- 13y ago
- PedroBatista 13y agoToo much soap opera style info for someone who is "considering" an $1.1B deal. It seems a bit odd, and everybody knows how these Hollywood style "romances" tend to end..
- minikomi 13y agoWith 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.
- Pxtl 13y agoExcept 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.
- AtTheLast 13y agoIn the past Yahoo has butchered their acquisitions. However, Marissa Mayer is a product focused CEO. I see her doing a good job of not messing up the Tumblr experience if Yahoo acquires it.
- yuhong 13y agoI think she is already trying to fix Flickr, in fact.
- kmfrk 13y agoThe iOS app, which is one of said attempts, is outright awful, so I haven't seen much of a track record to assuage my reservations about her ability to improve the offerings. Upcoming.org was also shut down in a really stupid way, regardless of whether you like the service it self. Very reminiscent of Google's way of going about things, actually. :)
- drgath 13y ago> The iOS app, which is one of said attempts, is outright awful It has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating in iTunes.
- jordanthoms 13y agoThe next Flickr? Hopefully they can keep innovating after an acquisition...
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoIsn'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?
- jessedhillon 13y agoIf 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.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoThe 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.
- onedev 13y agoHow much of that 1.4 million is due to people dying? Global churn affects your userbase when you have a userbase as insanely massive as Facebook's.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- drgath 13y ago54 million people die each year (150k / day) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate
- 13y ago
- jasonlingx 13y agoOh no... time to move off tumblr...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adventured 13y agoYahoo really needed a product to fill in that Geocities gap.
- phowat 13y agoCuriously, they had this tumblr clone called Yahoo! Meme ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Meme ). Which, IIRC, was developed by Yahoo Brazil and I guess marketed mostly in the south american market. I guess it didn't get anywhere since they killed it in May 2012.
- nwh 13y agoEven Archive Team won't be able to save Tumblr.
- kmfrk 13y agoI think a lot of people would be interested in supporting a Kickstarter of some sort, though.
- nwh 13y agoI've personally archived a few blogs, and the amount of data on tumblr is just incredible. Just a single one was almost 2.5GB. There's probably millions of blogs on tumblr.
- kmfrk 13y agoPerhaps image archival could be something for a second tier. It's just too important to give up over; a half-baked solution is better than none.
- hkmurakami 13y agoI wonder why they're deciding to offer an All-Cash offer rather than some part of the offer being in Stock. Yahoo's stock has done well lately and should be fairly attractive to Tumblr investors and management. Given the size of the potential acquisition, there aren't that many alternative suitors, so Yahoo should have pretty good leverage here, especially since Tumblr has gotten heat over the last few years regarding their lack of a business model. Maybe Yahoo is afraid that offering say ~$400MM in stock would dilute the existing shares and irritate existing shareholders?
- joshu 13y agoyou don't want to suddenly create a huge stockholder.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- UVB-76 13y agoIsn't Tumblr an IP nightmare, and wouldn't Yahoo taking ownership make it a giant target for litigation?
- NelsonMinar 13y agoWhy did someone leak this much information about a secret deal? Kara Swisher is an awesome reporter and the go-to for this kind of article, but whoever talked had a reason for doing so. One plausible guess; someone on Tumblr's board is trying to cement a second offer from another company. This article now names a price and a deadline.