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Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
- stevewilhelm 13y ago"We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing." - D. Karp Spending 1.1 billion on a company that says it's "not turning purple" may have some impact on morale in Sunnyvale and on Wall St.
- philsnow 13y agoYouTube didn't grow primary colors when it got adsorbed by the GOOG. I think there's precedent for letting a subsidiary group retain its own branding and culture, and for that to not cause morale to drop.
- B-Scan 13y agoIt looks that lot of their users don't like that idea: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-yahoo-from-buying-tumblr/ http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-yahoo-from-buying-tu... Disclosure: I work for iPetitions.
- nicholassmith 13y agoI like how reactionary that is, much like when people expected Instagram to suddenly gain pokes and sidebar ads when Facebook bought them. It may as well say 'WE DON'T LIKE CHANGE'.
- Afal 13y agoKinda reminds me when Kraft was about to acquire Cadbury there were thousands (Ok not literally but there was quite a bit of noise) of facebook groups saying that this shouldn't happen because "the chocolate will taste like dairylea cheese" as if Toblerone wasn't a thing that Kraft made. It's funny how when there's news of a company acquiring another people think straight away that it'll change drastically and overnight, making the huge assumption that the company is A) going to change anything B) doesn't know that changing something will break trust with users making their billion dollar purchase useless. Or maybe Yahoo will change things on tumblr who knows? I'd like Yahoo to add a feature to change your primary blog on tumblr. That would be nice to have..
- elithrar 13y ago> It looks that lot of their users don't like that idea: To be more precise, they don't like this: "Stop Yahoo! from buying Tumblr!! If this happens, the entire interface will be changed, and millions of users will delete their accounts - me being one of them. Please, please, please sign this to stop this!!" ... which isn't the same as Yahoo buying Tumblr. They don't want Yahoo to negatively change Tumblr (there's a difference).
- ivix 13y agoYou might want to fix the counter so it handles petitions with responses numbering over 1 million..
- B-Scan 13y agoTnx. It was fixed in new branch. Deployed to current one.
- brown9-2 13y agoHow do you quantify "a lot"? A number larger than zero, or even in the thousands, does not necessarily make that a large share or a majority of users.
- mattquiros 13y ago> Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up That line is a winner. Hahaha. It's a good thing though that they recognize the general sentiment that they do tend to screw up the products they acquire. Also, TechCrunch reports that the price is $1.1B http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/its-official-yahoo-is-buying-tumblr-for-1-1b-promises-to-keep-it-independent/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/its-official-yahoo-is-buyin...
- jordn 13y agoI do like how this article from yahoo finance has this heading and subheading: Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr Promises not to screw it up Fair enough. That probably is most people's biggest concern and expectation of what Yahoo will do.
- venomsnake 13y agoDoes yahoo have a good track record of acquiring services and not frakking them up? Not a troll question, I stopped using yahoo in 1999 but for the occasional openid.
- quarterto 13y agoThey didn't screw up Flickr. Then again, they didn't do anything with Flickr.
- speg 13y agoThat seems to be their M.O., remember Delicious?
- freehunter 13y agoThey kind of did screw up Flickr, just by virtue of letting it stagnate. They got lucky in that no one else really made anything better in the meantime.
- janlukacs 13y agoDon't get it why people are bitchin' about this so much. From what i understand Tumblr was running out of money so there was no other way out for them and their users. So we have option: a) cry about it online all day, make petitions ... and the whole system closes in a couple of months and you end up with nothing OR b) yahoo buys it and the site lives on
- sliverstorm 13y agoPeople en-mass are often short-sighted, self destructive, and like to feel like victims. I'm sure they would have been perfectly happy with option A.
- nicholassmith 13y ago'Promises not to screw it up'. I think Yahoo are keenly aware people are expecting them to fail badly at this, and want to try head it off at the pass. So Yahoo now has Mayer running the ship, and Karp involved ostensibly with Tumblr but I'd wager he'd have some input with the direction of Yahoo. He comes across as being a smart, focused guy in profiles, so he might have some bearing on where Yahoo is going.
- kmfrk 13y agoWhat happened to that alleged Flickr press event today? Is that a thing that's going to happen?
- cbolat 13y agoHope they'll keep promises
- mysterywhiteboy 13y agoI don't work for Yahoo, but I must say I would seriously consider working there now with Marissa Mayer at the helm. Mayer appears to be doing everything she can to drag Yahoo back to being relevant, and to me that sounds like an interesting (and potentially rewarding) challenge. I just hope she is looking for innovation from within as well as from acquisitions.
- chuhnk 13y agoA lot of people feel this way. I feel this way even after having worked at Google. Yahoo is going through an exciting transition and I'm confident it'll be competing with Google once more with Marissa Mayer at the top. Its not going to be quick or easy, this is about the long game.
- camus 13y agoOn the contrary i would seriously consider getting another job because i would feel like the management is totally broken. Yahoo is not going to be relevant again because they bought Tumblr. They cant even make their own product relevant. I cant even understand why anybody would buy Tumblr 1 billion or more. Dailymotion would have been a good deal, this service is relevant and people are starting to be willing to pay to watch videos. They could have bought loads of usefull stuff for 1 billion. To me it just feels like a publicity stunt to make the stock go higher for a few days , but what is the long term strategy ? At that rate Mayer will be out in 1 year from now.
- venomsnake 13y agoWell yahoo has things to offer to the tumblr team - a lot of technical and scalability know how. I won't be surprised if they are able to shave operating costs a lot and utilize better the labor force. The problem is that the valuable asset of tumblr are its users. And users are fickle bunch.
- w1ntermute 13y agoCutting costs is nice and all, but these are Internet companies. It's expected that an acquisition will bring about much more substantial synergies than they would for the merger of two ketchup companies.
- neya 13y agoThe two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience. A closer look: "to create advertising opportunities...that enhance the user experience." Yahoo, Seriously?
- dabeeeenster 13y agoYou can argue (half reasonably I think) that a more targeted advert is better for the user...
- d23 13y agoI certainly enjoy them a lot more. I saw an ad for an inexpensive VPS service on Facebook a few days ago that I wouldn't have heard about otherwise. It's a lot better than random Vistaprint ads.
- SatvikBeri 13y agoI use services like Yelp, Netflix, and Amazon to give me targeted recommendations all the time. If ads could somehow read my mind and bring up good recommendations on my browser's sidebar that would actually be very valuable.
- Mahn 13y agoIt's just PR speak for "we'll look for ways to make money with it that don't suck too much". Don't take PR speak too seriously :)
- pseut 13y agoUsually I'd agree with you, but I could see that being true for Tumblr. When I was using Tumblr actively, more than half of the content I followed was some expansive form of advertising, e.g. http://magnumfoundation.tumblr.com/ http://magnumfoundation.tumblr.com/
- neya 13y agoAgreed! Looks like it was a slight hypocricy on my part :D
- btipling 13y agoMaybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did seem like a bit of an uphill struggle since Tumblr got started a little earlier? Maybe that's it. Tumblr and Posterous were a new kind of microblog platform a couple of years ago, now Tumblr is massive and Posterious is dead. Another thing that seems interesting to me is that whenever someone exits into an acquisition it's like this space becomes open again for new startups. Someone should make a new microblogging platform that now disrups Tumblr/Yahoo. It's kind of like the dragon Ouroboros, eating its own tail, around here sometimes.
- Swizec 13y agoPorn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.
- freehunter 13y agoExcept HD-DVD. In that battle, it was the one who had a video game console backing the standard versus the one with porn but a console maker only paying lip service to the technology.
- durin42 13y agoThe way I remember it, Sony refused to let the porn industry print bluray discs, and the HD-DVD backers just didn't care, but bluray started winning as soon as Sony relented.
- wmf 13y agoHadn't porn already moved on to the Internet by the time Blu-ray/HD-DVD were released?
- ssharp 13y ago
- captn3m0 13y agoDoes anybody here think that this is a good deal for Yahoo?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wilfra 13y agoIt'll take at least a year before we have any idea. For now, just grab the popcorn. It's going to be fun to watch. Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram. Now it's probably worth several times that...
- shawabawa3 13y ago> Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram. Now it's probably worth several times that... Is it though? As far as I can tell it still has $0 revenue.
- joefarish 13y ago"Now it's probably worth several times that..." to Facebook. Facebook acquired Instagram because they were worried about the rapid growth of a photo sharing app that didn't involve Facebook. The Instagram purchase was a very expensive insurance policy.
- smountcastle 13y agoWow, so does this make Marco Arment a millionaire? Apparently he still has a financial stake in Tumblr: http://qr.ae/pKNI7 http://qr.ae/pKNI7
- MojoJolo 13y agoI always believe that Marco is already a millionaire with his blog and Instapaper earnings. But I'm curious how much of Tumblr he and David still owns.
- shanelja 13y agoI read somewhere on HN yesterday that David still had a 25% share, though I can't find the link so no citation unfortunately.
- andycroll 13y agoNot according to him as he was technically an employee, I did some analysis... http://andycroll.com/2013/05/20/tumblr-founder-shares-and-dilution/ http://andycroll.com/2013/05/20/tumblr-founder-shares-and-di...
- tommoor 13y agoWow - this came out of nowhere! How did they keep it so quiet until now?
- shanelja 13y agoThere seems to be a massive anti-Yahoo struggle going on in HN at the moment but I feel we need to look at this impartially. For better or for worse, the fate of the company is tied directly to the actions of Marissa Mayer now, this is no longer 1999 and Yahoo is no longer the same company. They have this image (which they rightly deserve) of being a big, bumbling ancient Behemoth of a company which provides no real use or purpose to the internet, but this could well be part of a bigger revitalization. Cutting off the fat of the company, bringing in new properties with the intention of keeping them alive, changing the company dynamics to make it a better place to work, bringing in more talent and having a much more youthful outlook on things... These are all good things. It remains to be seen whether or not Yahoo can perform this transition but things look good for them, if they stick to their guns and simply improve Tumblr without lowering its value to the community, I can see a real future for Yahoo, one where it isn't just irrelevant, but where it makes it's own products and creates new and exciting applications. What I really want to see, is whether Yahoo is capable of making the move to generation XI and what it brings to the table now it's finally left the time warp it was stuck in.
- citricsquid 13y agoA portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.
- shanelja 13y agoI could see both sides of the argument and not wishing to drag the thread on to a tangential discussion I do believe that it is better for the company in the long run, though perhaps not best for some of the companies individual employees.
- ajays 13y agoYou must be new around here (said in jest). HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.
- selamattidur 13y agoIt's terrific that Tumblr and its investors get to make a lot of money. I just don't understand all this talk about Tumblr remaining independent of Yahoo. Yahoo is mostly a pretty stagnant company that needs new ideas and ways of thinking and doing business. Tumblr offers that opportunity - making the central point of interaction a user-defined dashboard rather than an overly-programmed portal that fewer and fewer people visit out of inertia. Sure, let Tumblr be Tumblr so you don't scare off its audience. But unless Yahoo itself becomes more like Tumblr, what's the use of spending $1.1 billion?
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoI'm curious to see where the integration ends up on the spectrum of mergr vs. yacquisition.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoTo be clear, I'm not just word-playing. Will Yahoo smother Tumblr with integration projects like single sign-in, leaving insufficient resources to do anything new? Or will it be benign neglect? Or will they actually invest in it as a social platform (instead of as a database like they did with Flickr)? With new CEO, hopefully bad history won't repeat.
- gdonelli 13y ago"our promise not to screw it up"
- thegna 13y agoAsk HN: who is the biggest winner in the Yahoo-Tumblr merger? David Karp? Marco Arment? Marissa mayer? Union Square Ventures? Greylock Partners? Sequoia Capital?
- lleims 13y agoNew York City
- jskonhovd 13y agoThe same way the Groupon IPO was good for Chicago?
- elmuchoprez 13y agoI think it almost certainly has to be David Karp. This should be an insane and guaranteed payday for him. Marco Arment hasn't had anything to do with Tumblr in years. He might hold some equity as a result of his time there, especially since he was there at the very beginning, but certainly not more equity than Karp. Mayer/Yahoo has a long way to go to prove that this was a smart idea. Two years from now they might be the biggest winners, but they're also taking on all the risk at this point. And as for the investors, this should be a big win for them (although I don't know how much they invested, so hard to say how big of a win), but they are investment firms who have to spread the profits around, opposed to Karp, who is one guy who just got a huge check.
- agotterer 13y agoI hope this isn't a silly question... Reports say that tumblr is running low on cash and could only afford to operate for the next few months. This deal is going to take a few months (article says next quarter) to close. Is it not possible that they would run out of money before the deal officially closes?
- lifeformed 13y agoI'm sure Yahoo could help them out with that.
- randomsearch 13y agoIndeed. This seems to be the motivation behind the sale. I'm sure David Karp would have liked to keep tumblr independent, despite the huge payday, but it seems to me that he failed to develop a cohesive business model. I loved the focus he put on the market sector he was serving, and I share his hatred of intrusive advertising, but he didn't present a realistic alternative. It's a shame - we keep losing innovative businesses that don't think enough about long-term business models, so we have to hop onto the next big thing until it too gets snapped up. Much as I dislike Facebook, you have to respect Zuckerberg for not selling out... at least he's tried to build something sustainable.
- ancarda 13y agoDoes anyone know a tumblr-like service that's open-source that I can stick on my server (Nginx/PHP-FPM/MySQL). I should point out WordPress is far too heavy for a Raspberry Pi, I need something lightweight.
- adharmad 13y agoHere is Tumblr user's reaction to being acquired by yahoo: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yahoo http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yahoo
- ihsw 13y agoThe largest concerns seem to center around: Yahoo attempting to make Tumblr family-friendly, re-branding Tumblr into a Yahoo property, and where David Karp is going to be (now and in the future).
- wahsd 13y agoI am genuinely confused about something because my realization does not coincide with my previous held beliefs. So I would appreciate if someone else could validate or make a good argument for why I am wrong. These companies, especially the biggest ones and the ones that are acquired by them; they all seem to have one thing in common. They are all not at all about what they built, but, once you control for the variables, what you are left with is that it all comes down to users. These acquisitions have zero interest in the "product" as it is rarely unique or even innovative (image filters, "micro"-blogging, task management, etc.); it is all about acquiring the users. Is there anything that could point to these and most other acquisitions not being solely about the users. I find it hard to believe that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc couldn't build what are, essentially, usually, rather simple technologies. It seems like it all comes down to the human factor and that changing versus creating new habits is rather difficult and costly, i.e., more than $1 billion dollars costly. Sorry for the redundancy. I had to throw it together while being interrupted with work. Damn work.
- dangoldin 13y agoUsers by themselves aren't valuable but the ability to monetize them is. Whether it's by selling them products or by showing them advertisements. The bigger companies have better infrastructure in place to be able to monetize users and I think Yahoo just thinks they'll be able to monetize the Tumblr users and recoup their investment that way. It helps that the Tumblr demographic is most likely different from Yahoo's - although that may hurt them when trying to monetize since a different approach may be required. We'll see what happens.
- SatvikBeri 13y agoI think you're spot on. Cloning the technologies is relatively easy. But getting attention is a hard problem. As a general rule, companies rarely[0] win because of superior technology. Rather, they win because they use their tech in a way that provides superior value to their users. This is something all aspiring entrepreneurs should keep in mind. Nobody cares if your company uses incredibly elegant code or highly sophisticated Machine Learning/NLP/Functional Programming/whatever. All users care about is whether your product provides value. And remember that "value" is highly subjective-you may not think that Facebook is useful, but many people will disagree with you. [0]: there are certainly exceptions. If you know that the problem you're solving has major market demand, then you can win with superior execution. Viaweb is a good example, as pg tells it they won mostly because they could roll out features much faster than their competitors.
- oddshocks 13y ago"75 million more each day" -- those aren't "blog posts", those are expulsions of reposted Internet content, perhaps with an additional comment
- bobofett 13y agoOff the cusp, $1.1 billion seems like a staggering amount of money to pay for yet another content hub. My gut is screaming that this is sure to go down as a horrible waste of capital. Yahoo has much stronger footing in open source than many other companies. They still have a vague sense of coolness about them, and I feel they're pissing away a ton of money for no reason here. First they prevent employees from working at home, stomping out what could've blossomed into at the very least a novel and progressive work model. Now a billion for tumblr. What in the actual fuck are they thinking? What is the long term strategy here for Yahoo? They'd get more out of their money by selecting 1,000 open source projects on GitHub at random, and investing $1M into each.
- anuraj 13y agoCan yahoo repair the broken email experience? Can yahoo repair the broken Flickr experience? Can yahoo do some interesting product that delight users? If not, what is the point?
- pvnick 13y agoI've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Now is a very exciting time to work for yahoo.
- pknerd 13y agoI hope it's fate will not be similar to Posterous.
- pknerd 13y agoPromises not to screw it up Yes, they promise they won't screw it up Officially
- dschiptsov 13y agoSuch a classic exit - "and then sell it to Yahoo"..)
- methehack 13y agoIf there is any interest, I'm trying to start a meta discussion on successful acquisitions. I'm genuinely interested in examples, as I can think of none: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738288. All the ones I've been part of (five now), have been total crap.
- rokhayakebe 13y agoYoutube. Android. Applied Semantics. That L.A. co that became Adsense or Adwords. Google Maps, I believe. Writely (Google Word). That Israeli co that became Google Sheets. Somewhat Blogger and many more just for Google.
- fosap 13y agoIt seems to me they tried to buy a young and hip userbase. MySpace was once young and hip. It was where all the bands were. Tumblr is young, but not hip in any way. It's full of strange and not particular "social" (as in communicating and influencing the mainstream alot) people. Tumblr is full of (besides pron) homestuck fandom and feminists. It's full of some subcultures that are ridiculed by the mainstream (like MLP fans) and passive aggressive tweens. I'm not sure if Yahoo wanted that.
- Crake 13y agoYeah, seriously. My first reaction was, "Wait, you wanted this userbase?" Yahoo is so unhip that they don't even realize what they've gotten themselves into, probably. I'm sure some sane people have blogs on tumblr, but they're vastly outnumbered by the "social justice" retards who think that screaming about how all straight white men should be auschwitzed for their sins is some sort of legitimate activism. (Where sins = having been born.) A lot of the tumblr community's response to the acquisition has been downright hilarious, naturally. They're pretty offended that someone bought "their" blogs without their permission. Any explanation of how the world works is, of course, met with accusations of "privilege" and shouting about how the poster/yahoo/etc is trying to "oppress" their precious PEE-OH-CEES.
- blantonl 13y agoIf it was an acquhire they paid 5.8 million for each employee (187 employees). If it was to capture their revenue stream, they paid 85 dollars for every one dollar of revenue generated last year (13 million).
- dmourati 13y agostumblr