Does that matter? Those users aren't paying. Yahoo could very well kick 9/10ths of Tumblr's userbase off the site while retooling to make a profit from the other 10%, and it wouldn't change a single thing about their financials.
To put it another way: right now, Tumblr is making no money for Yahoo. Destroying the site and its reputation to make it into something profitable is actually the sensible move, compared to just leaving it alone. If they just wanted to leave it alone... why did they acquire it?
To go even further, though, I don't think they need any of Tumblr's current userbase. When I said that "Yahoo has a social network: Tumblr", I wasn't referring to the userbase, but to the codebase and the built-up staffing with social-network-running expertise. They could throw out Tumblr-the-website, and transfer all the people working on it to a new, fresh-from-scratch social network project (maybe built on Tumblr-the-backend), and it'd still be a more sensible strategy than leaving it alone.
What good is that content, if you're not monetizing it, from a bottom-line standpoint? You're actually losing money hosting all that content, paying for servers, storage, and bandwidth, if you're not making back something from it.
To put it another way: right now, Tumblr is making no money for Yahoo. Destroying the site and its reputation to make it into something profitable is actually the sensible move, compared to just leaving it alone. If they just wanted to leave it alone... why did they acquire it?
To go even further, though, I don't think they need any of Tumblr's current userbase. When I said that "Yahoo has a social network: Tumblr", I wasn't referring to the userbase, but to the codebase and the built-up staffing with social-network-running expertise. They could throw out Tumblr-the-website, and transfer all the people working on it to a new, fresh-from-scratch social network project (maybe built on Tumblr-the-backend), and it'd still be a more sensible strategy than leaving it alone.