SOCIAL MEDIA: Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion dollars.
By Aysouda Malekzadeh, News Editor
Tumblr CEO David Karp sold his blogging platform for $1.1 billion to Yahoo in a deal arranged by CEO Marissa Mayer. This is the biggest deal yet for Mayer, who defected from Google last summer to take over Yahoo. Yahoo hopes to attract a wider range of younger, more active online users with its purchase of Tumblr, since Tumblr has 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 sign-ups every day, with about 900 posts a second. This transaction has many Tumblr users worried that the site will be cluttered by the ads that bring Yahoo billions of dollars a year. However, Yahoo claims that fans should not be worried since Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business with Karp staying on as CEO. Mayer asserts that there will be no Yahoo branding on Tumblr.
Mayer will face many challenges with the acquisition of Tumblr. Most prominently, she has to oversee the successful takeover of Tumblr, given that Yahoo has a notorious reputation for paying big money for start-ups and then allowing them to fall apart. Previous purchases by Yahoo, like Flickr for $35 million and GeoCities for $3.6 billion, have either been shut down or neglected within the company.
As a result, Mayer is under pressure to keep Tumblr’s staff intact. It is still unclear whether or not all of Tumblr’s 175 employees, based in New York, will move to Yahoo, based in California. In an effort to quiet the outcry over this deal Mayer “promises not to screw it up.”
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