
Yahoo rolls back decision to combine Tumblr’s sales team with Yahoo’s - prostoalex
http://www.businessinsider.sg/yahoos-plan-to-combine-its-sales-team-with-tumblr-failed-2016-2/?op=1?r=US&IR=T#.VsDeUGQrLw4
======
rayalez
Tumblr has a lot of potential, it could be really great, but it's not well
done.

Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on
medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet. Also search is
horrible, I am typing a blogger's nickname or the name of the website and his
original content is nowhere in the results, only reposts and copies.

If they would just learn from medium and copied a lot of the things they did
right - that would already be a huge step forward.

Then they could monetize it by allowing bloggers to advertise their blogs, or
by creating a store with ebooks/merch, or a smart donation system.

~~~
hammock
>Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on
medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet

We see comments like this all the time for social platforms that are in a
mature lifestage: Digg, Reddit, various other forums, etc

These found success with their "poor" design and discovery, why change now,
and what evidence is there that such change would alter their course?

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> These found success with their "poor" design and discovery

To be fair, both Digg and Reddit have very _simple_ interfaces which work
quite well from a UI/UX perspective. And after Digg's redesign, it's actually
much easier to find stuff I want to read. Reddit for better or worse, has
stuck with their simple design and the users still love it after all these
years.

I will agree however, both sites lack of a decent search functionality, Can't
remember how many times I found something interesting on Reddit and tried to
come back the next day to find it and only found stuff from a year ago after
entering the entire title of the post. Digg is the same way.

~~~
Razengan
Reddit's search is next to useless. Sometimes you can't even use it to find
something you _know_ you saw just a few days ago, or even your own comments!

Using Google with "site:reddit.com" is way more effective.

It's one of those things which everybody knows that it sucks, but as soon as
you bring it up in an official feedback forum, you basically get tut-tut'ed by
other users into accepting it's somehow good enough and we shouldn't ask the
developers for something that'd be "hard to code."

------
Animats
This is strange. They ran into trouble merging the sales organizations. Two
product lines doesn't mean you need two sales organizations, even if they have
different demographics and need different types of ads. Why sell the same
customers twice?

Does Youtube have a separate sales organization from Google Ads?

~~~
NegatioN
Your point has merit, but I would argue that YouTube has a much broader
audience than tumblr. I assume this would make it easier to have a centralised
sales team. (If they actually do)

------
at-fates-hands
_" We were distributing Tumblr sponsored posts across Yahoo content in their
native stream, but very few advertisers actually wanted it because it’s a
different audience. And the content on Tumblr was very different from the
content on Yahoo,"_

Isn't this something fundamental to having one sales team? Knowing which ads
should be run on each platform? Not sure you could miss something so huge and
still expect the same or better results. This is a huge "WTF" moment for both
properties.

------
funkyy
Tumblr is a jewel in a crown of Marissa Meyer. It should be in instruction
book under - how to screw huge opportunities.

~~~
nashashmi
Add Microsoft/aQuantive and HP/Autonomy to the mix as well.

~~~
rjsw
I thought the jury was still out on HP and Autonomy.

------
tacos
550 million users and less than $100 million in revenue.

A penny and a half per user per month.

This company turns 10 next year.

~~~
RyJones
That is an astoundingly low ARPU. I see Twitter predicts between $2.50 and $4
ARPU.

I looked for but couldn't quickly find a recent Flickr revenue breakout.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-targets-ads-logged-
use...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-targets-ads-logged-
users-154256083.html)

~~~
tomjen3
Flicker has a relatively low free tier and is targeted at people who are
amature or professional photographers, ie people who can afford at least 2k of
entry gear.

Tumblr has no paid tier and is targeted at (or mostly used by) teens and early
twenty-somethings.

So I would question any direct comparision between the two.

~~~
tbyehl
Flickr killed Pro several years ago, removed restrictions on the Free tier,
offered paid options to go ad-free or add a second TB of storage, then later
killed those options and brought back Pro as stats and no ads.

Flickr's free tier is no longer low. What their audience is these days, who
the hell knows.

------
nashashmi
This reminds me of a trail of failing integrations. The lesson I derive is
that it is much easier for a highly disciplined (and uncreative) organization
like Microsoft to incorporate a technology/acquisition into their team, than
it is for a highly creative undisciplined organization to incorporate the
discipline and technology of its parent.

Case Study Example: AQuantive and HP Autonomy

------
chris_wot
Yup, this is what happens when you force through "integrations" on a
profitable, smaller organisation with your larger, slower organisation.

You get:

* integration technical problems

* power struggles

* dominance by the bigger group, and a lack of understanding what made the smaller company work so well

* some of your best people leave. If you mishandle it, lots of your best people leave.

* a major slowdown in any growth whilst largely valueless politics and questionable business practices distract the original company and they take their eye off the ball

Honestly, precisely how many tech takeovers really work? The CEO and board
gets this _great_ idea that they can buy a hot company to turn around the
fortunes of their existing company. Then they take all their inefficiencies,
bad ideas, politics, incompetence and total lack on insight and corporate
memory and force that upon the company they bought. They normally chuck out
the original management (not always, but frequently) who made it all work in
the first place, then they start imposing changes on customers, leading to
pissed off customers. A good example is that the taken-over company has
support processes that work quite well for them, but they force customers to
go through their existing support systems, which are often slow, inefficient,
off-shore, and have a first point of call who probably doesn't know much about
the service they are meant to support.

Often the parent company don't know about back channels used by the original
company to gather feedback to iterate effectively. Those aren't normally
documented and are part of institutional memory and culture, gained over years
of hard work.

Goodwill in the company then dives, and after 2-3 years (sometimes earlier)
the original management team have a shell of the original company. Then they
realise that their profit forecasts they originally promised to justify the
takeover were hugely optimistic, and even the realistic forecast that in all
probability would have been met had they not taken over the company won't be
met due to the bloody awful decisions they have made.

At this point, they either: roll back their pointless or bad changes, bring in
a new management team, or shutter the acquired company after strip mining the
assets of their acquisition.

Rolling back the changes often leads to an even worse situation because now
the original company has lost their momentum, lots of key people have left,
they haven't been able to adapt as the market changes, and they have lost a
huge amount of existing customer goodwill. Now the company must a. Fix the
problems caused by the people who imposed it on them, b. Still play political
games as people who were responsible for the awful decisions cover their arse
and still have the ear of those in the parent company (which makes it harder
to justify going back to the way things were), c. Explain to customers who
have been put through turmoil (and who might be getting used to the albeit
detrimental changes they have experienced) why they must now go through yet
more changes as the company tries to put things back to the way they were, and
d. They now have to justify their very existence, even though their momentum,
talent, and direction were severely and adversely disrupted. Point d. is
particularly damaging because they are still expected to meet the unrealistic
earnings targets predicted by the original CEO, but often it's an impossible
task.

Bringing in a new management team rarely works. Unless they are extremely
good, then all the disruption of rolling back changes tends to happen, but now
you have a new set of people who don't have a clear grasp of the business, and
this time they don't even have the advantages of the original team (advise,
goodwill, talent, etc) that the original management team had.

Eventually, if rolling back changes or bringing in a new management team don't
work, then the original company gets shuttered anyway. If the acquiring
company is lucky, the profits generated by the acquired company largely cover
the costs of acquisition. But they lose enormous amounts of goodwill, both
from those who are retrenched (ultimately for no good reason) and who might be
potential customers or even competitors in the future, and from customers who
were treated shoddily and who quite possibly see your company as a risk to
deal with as they were left in the lurch and now need to spend time and
resources finding an alternative product or service, with all its
corresponding risks and implementation issues.

I can't see larger companies ceasing or even improving their acquisition
processes any time soon. All I can say is that if you are a customer who uses
a product or service from a company who is taken over or is part of a merger,
start immediately planning on the best way to migrate from them should you
need to so you mitigate your risk. And if you are an employee, by all means
hold on for the ride, but be aware that the things you love about working for
your company are quite likely to change or be entirely lost - and ultimately
you may find you won't have a job. Dust off your resume, do _not_ fight the
system (that way madness lies), accept it's out of your control and take steps
to handle disruption in your working life.

~~~
Agustus
Where are the lessons learned from these integrations? We are currently 15
years into the dot com malaise and there does not seem to be good project
managers or decision makers who recognize what they need requirements-wise and
then what it will take to bring a person/team/company into the fold.

Hate him or love him, Zuckerberg has a team that integrates. Instagram was
brought into the fold at Facebook and there has been little to no rumblings
across the board from the users to the developers. WhatsApp has been left
alone at Facebook and I still use it.

The integration teams exist, but the processes and/or politics are killing the
integrations at a lot of companies.

~~~
chris_wot
Zuckerberg has a higher hit to miss ratio, it's true, but don't for one moment
think that Facebook does a great job of acquiring smaller companies. You only
have to look at Parse to see that even Facebook just can't seem to do it well.

~~~
batuhanicoz
Slightly off topic but I'd say the way Parse was handled was pretty good.

~~~
chris_wot
Not off topic at all :-) I have no real knowledge about why Parse failed other
than what has already been written. In fact, your comment is probably fair and
nothing I said above applies to this situation. Sometimes takeovers just fail,
and nobody is to blame. It's just that, IMO, it's very rare this occurs.

------
dangerpowpow
Not sure what happened but I kinda miss some(many actually) of the tumblr
blogs that I had in my bookmarks, most of them return a 404.

~~~
skewart
I've noticed a lot of tumblr blogs I used to enjoy simply stopped being
maintained by their creators. In some cases they've even been deleted.

There still seems to be a vibrant community on tumblr, but it's different from
the one that flourished five or six years ago. A lot of the design-focused
bloggers have simply left.

~~~
true_religion
Where have they gone to? Medium?

~~~
ddw
Ello! (kidding)

------
Gratsby
> "She also named Tumblr as one of the three core platforms for Yahoo going
> forward, "

I thought Tumblr went the way of Friendster years and years ago. I find it
hard to believe that their user base is getting any bigger aside from bots and
spammers.

------
josu
Not clickbait title:

"Yahoo is rolling back the decision to combine Tumblr’s sales team with
Yahoo’s broader sales organization"

~~~
chris_wot
My understanding is that there is a preference in keeping the original
source's title.

~~~
dang
Except when it is misleading or linkbait.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Edit: I'm not sure the OP was particularly baity, but we'll change the title
to josu's suggestion.

~~~
chris_wot
I _really_ need to reread those guidelines.

