BLOGGING: Much to the displeasure of many Tumblr users, owner and CEO David Karp sold the site to Yahoo for $1.1 billion in order to finance more improvements.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
Tumblr needed more funds to expand its horizons and improve the site for its users. Yahoo felt that it needed to appeal to Internet users outside of the 50 and older demographic that it currently appeals to. The two owners therefore chose to cooperate—Karp by selling Tumblr to Yahoo, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer by agreeing to purchase it. Both parties felt it was a good decision as Tumblr has the younger demographic of 13-29 year olds that Yahoo was looking for and Yahoo has the money to improve the site. Users, however, immediately took up arms against the agreement.
Though Mayer initially released a statement saying that Yahoo would not “screw it [Tumblr] up,” they have now called for making Tumblr more “family friendly,” despite the statement that there would be little intervention on the site, including no action against all of the pornography uploaded to the site against its rules. While most users would not care if pornographic nudes are removed, many not-safe-for-work artists have left the site for Wordpress because of the call for more family friendly content. They fear that artistic nudity, though allowed by the site rules, will be removed along with the gore that horror artists enjoy in order to create a more all-age appropriate environment.
Additionally, there are rumors of Yahoo removing “fandom blogs,” fan pages dedicated to one specific series, band or topic, presumably under the excuse of promoting the “creativity” alluded to in their motto. This only added more fuel to the fire, as it means that Yahoo will remove even original content based off of existing media, and resulted in a viral call to action against Yahoo. Whether Yahoo will go through with this plan is unknown, but Wordpress has experienced a massive rise in new users. The likely addition of ads due to the monetization of content has caused more users to jump ship as well.
Although Yahoo purchased the site in order to appeal to Tumblr users, it has caused more alienation than acceptance due to its contradictory statements. At this point, it is unlikely that it will get any previous users back. The best move would be to just leave Tumblr alone like Yahoo stated initially. All of Tumblr’s original staff is still on payroll to run it and Yahoo should just allow that staff to continue to run it without interference. Yahoo should be careful before it wastes its investment and kills the site as it did to Geocities in the 90s.