
How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo - awwstn
https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/how-tumblr-can-save-yahoo-cfd0dfd142fe#.agr31baa7
======
discardorama
Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)
It's a bit dated but relevant.

2 steps _must_ be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo:

1\. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers

2\. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.

~~~
geoffreykeating
That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that
much fear : )

~~~
frik

      > Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :)
    

First it's not funny. Many companies including Netscape, Google (and at the
moment PaaS companies) have/had the fear that Microsoft will crush them. You
are either too young, or an employee of MS, otherwise nothing funny about.
Maybe you should read pg's essay:

    
    
      "Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone 
      at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a 
      technology company, the next thought would have been 
      that Microsoft would crush them.
    
      It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand 
      the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a 
      company with several times the power Google has now, but 
      way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of 
      them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet 
      company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if 
      they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the 
      same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would 
      turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"

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pkaler
The way to save Yahoo is for Yahoo to kill Yahoo.

Tumblr is in New York. Away from Sunnyvale. Yahoo could build a new Yahoo
there that was comprised of small teams, making new products, shipping on a
regular cadence, shielded from the mothership.

When the original Macintosh was created, the team was in a new building away
from the Apple II team. Yahoo needs to find its own pirate flag to fly.

~~~
cobookman
When I worked at yahoo I suggested this idea. Take yahoo as we know it today,
silo it off and give it just enough resources to keep it alive. Then with the
massive cash reserves & rest of the employees start experimenting new products
that are not under the yahoo name, but get media exposure from Yahoo. If one
of them is successful make that the new yahoo.

Sadly, It was not taken over well. If I were an executive I'm not sure I'd
also risk my lucrative salary either. I'm also pretty sure the shareholders
would not appreciate us burning potentially billions of dollars if this plan
failed. So I totally get where management has gone. Its just sad as yahoo
never really got a fighting chance.

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theOnliest
Tumblr has recently (actually, not so recently any more) disabled commenting
on their platform. My partner is part of a relatively close running community
that used to use Tumblr to connect with others, give/receive encouragement
about their runs, and so on. Since they disabled comments (with some half-
hearted promise about bringing them back, well, _sometime_ ) hardly any of her
friends post any more.

Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people
using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging)
seems ill-advised.

~~~
caractacus
Why would they do this? _Remove_ comments? Unless trolling and racism and
abuse were an overwhelming problem on the platform (and I don't believe they
were any worse than anywhere else) why would a major platform built on user
engagement deliberately disable comments?

~~~
theOnliest
Beats me. The announcement about them disabling it was in late October
([http://support.tumblr.com/post/131951272032/pardon-our-
dust-...](http://support.tumblr.com/post/131951272032/pardon-our-dust-hey-you-
know-the-reply-feature)), and on Nov. 4 they confirmed they were coming back,
eventually ([http://support.tumblr.com/post/132577661107/david-
wizardries...](http://support.tumblr.com/post/132577661107/david-wizardries-
can-tumblr-make-it-so-we)). There's been no movement since then as far as I
can tell.

I think they want the reblog to be the primary form of engagement, but that's
silly for a lot of things, because the entire original post shows up in the
reblog by default. For a running community (just one example), that's pretty
lousy: you don't want to clutter up your own blog just to say "That's really
fast, congratulations! Keep it up!" to a dozen other people.

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awl130
Yahoo is a farce. Ostensibly it is a kind of passive index fund that only
holds two assets: Alibaba and Yahoo, which is rapidly declining in value and
should be cashflowed out (remove overhead, no add'l investment and collect
cash til it dies--or sold to a PE fund that will do that). Typical passive
fund managers earn their fee 2%/20% by re-balancing their portfolio as needed
to approximate the index. Yahoo is not even doing that. so in fact they are
more like a pass through or shell entity that holds one asset, usually for tax
advantageous reasons. thus the managers (yahoo management) should get some
nominal fee comparable to a clearinghouse. Marissa Meyer earns $20mm per year
for running a shell company. that's like paying your agent in the cayman
islands $20mm per year merely to file the paperwork to remain incorporated
there. what a fucking farce.

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dotcoma
A company that can be 'saved' by Tumblr is in serious trouble indeed.

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tacos
During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their
dashboards that forthcoming legislation would _destroy the service_. They
enabled one-click to contact your representative. It generated 87,000 calls.
[http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-
thing](http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing)

At the time, I remember seeing HN jumping up and down about how great this
was. I was excited too, because now I had hard data of a 0.29% response rate.
Tumblr as a business died that day.

It doesn't matter how many users you have or what their demographic is if you
haven't created a culture of commerce. In the absence of revenue, "rope in
millions of users and then reap the profits" seems to scale to about three
people profiting per transaction.

2013: "Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer
said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on
their own pages."

It's 2016 and Tumblr still shows zero revenue on Yahoo's balance sheet.

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hbbio
I appreciate this post being on Medium.

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pussinboots
while i agree that unifying the yahoo-tumblr experience is a good direction,
it won't save yahoo. the problem with both twitter and tumblr is that
advertising within the content platform is ineffective and does not generate
enough revenue

~~~
fivesigma
Who would've thought that blog posts about the evil patriarchy cannot generate
enough revenue.

Also the fact that tumblr blogs look like they came straight out of 2006. We
have mainstream 24-27inch screens with 1920 horizontal pixels now. Why do most
tumblr blogs look like geocities-era thin vertical strips of annoying gifs
filled with tiny blocks of hard to read text?

~~~
hobs
The same reason so many other websites decide to waste so much real estate:
phones.

edit: also being lazy.

~~~
fivesigma
I guess they were unable to grok responsive design CSS practices, even at a
$1b valuation.

Case in point of some people who get it: medium.com

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mattkevan
Tumblr save Yahoo? Wow. The other day I logged into Tumblr for the first time
in ages, and there was a HTML5 animation thing in the background which
completely froze Safari on my recent MBP.

Completely unusable, even with the fans spinning so hard I thought the thing
was going to take off.

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pinaceae
not sure the author understands the magnitudes of money at play here. tumblr
is a blip in yahoo world. on its own its a niche, nothing more. beloved by
some, sure, but nowhere near the stuff that would be needed to turn around
yahoo.

~~~
emsy
I agree, as a Tumblr outsider I'm under the impression that Tumblr's
(community) importance is mainly self importance.

