Yahoo! Pays $1.1 Billion to Purchase Tumblr
And Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer promises not to screw things up. Still, thousands of users started migrating to other platforms after the acquisition was announced.
Yahoo! kicked off the week by announcing that it entered an agreement to acquire popular micro-blogging platform and social networking website Tumblr for the amount of about $1.1 billion in cash – the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second half of the year. David Karp, Tumblr’s founder and CEO, will remain onboard and will receive a $250 million share from the aforementioned $1.1 billion.
Tumblr hosts more than 105 million blogs, has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors, some 120,000 singups every day, more than 900 posts per second, and is generally one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Yahoo! hopes that by acquiring Tumblr it could grow its audience by 50% and increase traffic by about 20%. Yahoo! will gain access to lots of users while Tumblr will be able to integrate Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure.
Knowing that acquiring Tumblr will raise a few eyebrows with the user base, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer made sure to announce that they won’t mess it up, that they will only put their support behind Tumblr and help it get better over time.
“We promise not to screw it up” announced Mayer via the official Yahoo! Blog that has now moved to Tumblr. “Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.”
Despite these reassuring words from Marissa Mayer, thousands of bloggers decided to abandon Tumblr and move on to other platforms. According to Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, some 400 to 600 posts are imported from Tumblr per hour . When rumors about the acquisition starting floating around the web, that hourly import rate spiked – more than 70,000 blogs posts were imported to Wordpress.
Yahoo! kicked off the week by announcing that it entered an agreement to acquire popular micro-blogging platform and social networking website Tumblr for the amount of about $1.1 billion in cash – the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second half of the year. David Karp, Tumblr’s founder and CEO, will remain onboard and will receive a $250 million share from the aforementioned $1.1 billion.
Tumblr hosts more than 105 million blogs, has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors, some 120,000 singups every day, more than 900 posts per second, and is generally one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Yahoo! hopes that by acquiring Tumblr it could grow its audience by 50% and increase traffic by about 20%. Yahoo! will gain access to lots of users while Tumblr will be able to integrate Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure.
Knowing that acquiring Tumblr will raise a few eyebrows with the user base, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer made sure to announce that they won’t mess it up, that they will only put their support behind Tumblr and help it get better over time.
“We promise not to screw it up” announced Mayer via the official Yahoo! Blog that has now moved to Tumblr. “Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.”
Despite these reassuring words from Marissa Mayer, thousands of bloggers decided to abandon Tumblr and move on to other platforms. According to Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, some 400 to 600 posts are imported from Tumblr per hour . When rumors about the acquisition starting floating around the web, that hourly import rate spiked – more than 70,000 blogs posts were imported to Wordpress.
