This is great. I see many important points in this declaration:
* animated gif and posted on tumblr : Yahoo gets it. Its CEO as well.
* "We will operate Tumblr independently" : I think this is exactly what everyone hoped, and what all big acquisition should be like (Facebook did that with Instagram and it's great!). That means NSFW will stay NSFW.
* "David Karp will remain CEO." The most qualified people to grow Tumblr are the people already in place. This is great, everyone's relieved.
I really think Yahoo's back in the game now. I would never have used yahoo before. Now hundred thousands of people are. And they are from the new generation.
What's (allegedly) hard to grasp is that Tumblr is Tumblr, not a generic money-engine that eats X dollars worth of fuel and puts out $Y worth of value. Mayer is acknowledging that part of Tumblr's recipe for spitting out that $Y is the culture that the users and the team have made, and that approaching it as if that didn't matter will not work.
Whether that's how Tumblr's integration into Yahoo! will actually be treated remains to be seen.
What's this non-NSFW madness you talk about? Most of the beauty of Tumblr for many of us has been the lax of TOS enforcement from the people at Tumblr, this has rendered countless of blogs ranging from vanilla porn to the most gore-ish and deviated pictures I have seen in my life.
I think I'll just sit back and watch how this develops, I am an avid Tumblr user and I would really hate it if they started to take away my much beloved NSFW blogs.
Aside from the infrastructure and potential monetization capabilities Yahoo brings to Tumblr, I suspect the major undercurrent here is Mayer becoming a mentor to Dave Karp. I don't see this deal happening w/ just any other pair of CEO's; I don't think the crew running the show before MM could really tell you what Tumblr was. Maybe Jerry Yang, but certainly not the interim team.
it's not funny and that was not censorship. it was an expression of collective disappointment at a user's attempt to marginalize the CEO of a large and influential tech company made purely on the grounds of her being a woman.
it's an interesting move for yahoo! and i'm curious as to see how their revitalization campaign plays out.
Facebook is free. Google is free. LinkedIn is free. In fact Yahoo is free. Why would the freeness of tumblr have any negative effect on your analysis of this deal?
This might be the way for Yahoo to succeed - operate as a holding company, plus optionally provide core services (identity management) to their independent properties.
So, no synergies other than ... authentication services? Then what's the point of buying them? Remember, Tumblr is barely making any money and was running out of cash. If Yahoo has nothing to offer them other than "identity management" and bureaucracy, then this is yet another failed Yahoo acquisition.
My (unspoken) assumption is that Yahoo management can successfully monetize Tumblr. Is Tumblr going to continue to bleed dollars? Yes, in the short term. But the Yahoo board is willing to invest 1.1B in them, and obviously think that in the future the Tumblr services will be a complementary product offering and will become profitable. Hopefully Marissa & the board have a roadmap for fixing & growing the firm, and that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision.
There are other likely synergies - back office functions (accounting, HR, etc), but also ad serving. I don't personally know how good the Yahoo ad network is, but by all accounts, it has got to be better than Tumblr's.
I think the key change that has to happen is that acquisitions have to have the choice in picking a Yahoo technology to adopt (or not..) and that it can't be forced down their throat. And if Marissa is smart, she'll block any Yahoo people asking questions like "So, why aren't you using our fabulous tech?", because merely asking the question takes away valuable time.
The great contradiction being that if "Yahoo management" are monetizing Tumblr, it's hardly independent in a strict sense. I know where you're coming from, but it was only last year David admitted he was an idiot to say ads made him sick - he didn't push them very hard and I think that's going to be a tough balance. Oh and Tumblr claimed their roadmap isn't changing, which if true means Yahoo's board's roadmap is irrelevant. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
David was likely approaching the subject from the standpoint of a user -- no one likes ads that are too in-your-face and irrelevant. But as a Division Head (no longer CEO...), he has to ensure that he is profitable. Like I said, I don't know how good Yahoo's ad-serving network is, and hopefully they have a broad & deep enough pool of content to show visitors, so that Tumblr remains a viable publishing platform.
Given Marissa's previous stint at Google, I expect her to focus her attention next on their ad-serving. A large & strong revenue stream will keep the board off her back and give her time to fix other things there that need fixing.
I agree with you here! I think Mayer posting on Tumblr is a sign of her commitment and acknowledgement (obviously) to Tumblr....I hope more Yahoo employees (ESP Mayer), continue to use Tumblr consistently to feel what their users feel and be committed.
Marissa Mayer's blog post about Yahoo! having acquired Tumblr leads with the "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda image that the British government generated during the war but never used because it was only meant to be rolled out as a very last resort in the emergency situation that Nazis had occupied England.
I'm assuming you don't live or visit the UK often, as that poster is everywhere and is used in various forms by huge numbers of companies. There is absolutely no political subtext to its use anymore.
I think it's funny to see people use things in apparent ignorance of their historical context; for example I was totally bummed that http://www.gophercon.com/ wasn't about the protocol.
>only meant to be rolled out as a very last resort in the emergency situation that Nazis had occupied England.
Source? I'm reading that it was to be used if they experienced a "national catastrophe" or bombings with poison gas. I don't even know if it makes sense to print a propaganda poster for use after occupation.
This claim is not well-sourced (i.e. I exaggerated way beyond what we can prove is true.). Michael Balfour's 1979 book "Propaganda in War 1939–1945: Organizations, Policies and Public in Britain and Germany" discusses the slogan briefly in a footnote saying that it was considered too extreme vs. other possible slogans:
""By 3 August they had drawn up a shortlist of five slogans which was shown on that day to Hoare, who chose the three actually put into production (INF 720). The third poster 'Keep Calm and Carry on' [sic] was never displayed, as too obviously inappropriate to the actual conditions.""
> We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO.
What this really says is that even though Yahoo! acquired all of the Tumblr stock it will remain an independent company and Yahoo will not ask for favours or influence Tumblr in any way.
So Tumblr will not be absorbed or coerced to do things it would not otherwise do.
But then, a few lines down:
> The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.
If Tumblr is still independent how does this grow Yahoo!'s audience?
> Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.
If Tumblr so far saw no reason to require a Yahoo! login and their first move (the ink on the agreement is not even dry yet) is to go for a Yahoo! ID (any other interpretation of that line?) and Yahoo! search then clearly they are not as independent as suggested in the first few lines.
I put very little faith in promises made by executives of companies being acquired or the ones doing the acquiring around the time of a major deal. See:
I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at Yahoo's balance sheet, it's 100% of its cash equivalents and 25% of its current assets.
On one other hand, the strategic value could be valuable:
* Product team that understands the uniqueness of creative community (focus on reblogging, photo blogging, media focus)
* Retention of creator community/teen community and its long term SEO potential
* An audience that probably provides augmentation to Yahoo's total sites and probably adds unique users on a de-dup basis
* There's also the viability of monetizing it the way Twitter/YouTube has monetized by carefully monetizing the users will not pissing off the community
On the other hand:
* Yahoo doesn't have a good track record of internal executives working with acquisitions
* They are still at the stage where their M&A integration is probably nascent (sales/marketing integration, executive alignment, OKR alignment)
Hard for me to make an opinion of this, but it is risky give Yahoo's balance sheet.
Like a race car driver saying, "don't hit the wall... don't hit the wall" then bang, into the wall. Not being in Yahoo's shoes I don't know what I'd say. But I don't think that anything could be said to ease the concerns of the acquired customers. Actions speak louder than words and words can sometimes cloud actions.
There was a point a couple years ago when Posterous was really innovating and Tumblr seemed dead-- the Tumblr staff (CEO?) were ranting at their users and there were technical problems.
Is there any reason that Tumblr couldn't take the freemium route? It has high engagement, and a passionate audience that might well be willing to pay to keep the same Tumblr they always had, as opposed to a sanitised ad-friendly one.
Of course, there's the possibility that its audience won't have the means to pay up, or that people will just go elsewhere.
Seems like a good time to sell to Yahoo!
You get a lot of money and you can negotiate dream terms.
Yahoo! is very desperate to get an audience and they need one.
If you exclude Flickr which Yahoo! service did you use in the last years, for myself none.
These promises don't matter at all, once they are acquired they are owned by Yahoo and their fate is at the hands of the owner - flickr went through it , many others did, it's a predictable story
* animated gif and posted on tumblr : Yahoo gets it. Its CEO as well.
* "We will operate Tumblr independently" : I think this is exactly what everyone hoped, and what all big acquisition should be like (Facebook did that with Instagram and it's great!). That means NSFW will stay NSFW.
* "David Karp will remain CEO." The most qualified people to grow Tumblr are the people already in place. This is great, everyone's relieved.
I really think Yahoo's back in the game now. I would never have used yahoo before. Now hundred thousands of people are. And they are from the new generation.