
What would have happened to Tumblr without Yahoo? Trouble - prostoalex
http://gigaom.com/2013/08/08/what-would-have-happened-to-tumblr-without-yahoo-trouble/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
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adventured
It's interesting too, because previously Karp had claimed that it would be
easy to reach profitability. He said all they'd have to do is put one ad spot
on the dashboard, and that would do it based on views. Color me skeptical that
it would have been that easy.

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aiaf
The article doesn't clarify running costs for Tumblr. Might help us put things
in perspective-- why is $13,000,000 in advertising revenue troublesome?

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hamburglar
Hard to say what their infrastructure costs are, but just salaries for 178
employees is way more than $13MM.

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boyter
The real question being why did they have 178 employees?

It sounds almost like they were following the Digg engineering approach rather
then Reddit's.

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citricsquid
[http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=1668979](http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=1668979)

A lot of "brand strategists"

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adventured
The number of people with "brand" in their title is amazing.

Is that a fancy title for someone who interacts with the tumblr community? I
noticed they're located all over the place.

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toble
In ad sales lingo, 'brand' is pay per view or sponsorship advertising. These
people will be looking after the big clients, think music labels, movie
studios, TV networks...

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gojomo
Tumblr almost certainly had other options – another bidder or possible
bridge/follow-on funding.

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shiftpgdn
You can't have follow-on funding for all eternity.

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super-serial
$80 million cash out for 4 years of servitude? Bad deal.

I wouldn't sell my baby for that.

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coryl
_I wouldn 't sell my baby for that._

Heh, well first you'd need to have a baby. A baby worth $1bn of which you
owned 20-25% equity.

