
Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr - olivercameron
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquire-tumblr-120000116.html
======
shanelja
There seems to be a massive anti-Yahoo struggle going on in HN at the moment
but I feel we need to look at this impartially. For better or for worse, the
fate of the company is tied directly to the actions of Marissa Mayer now, this
is no longer 1999 and Yahoo is no longer the same company.

They have this image (which they rightly deserve) of being a big, bumbling
ancient Behemoth of a company which provides no real use or purpose to the
internet, but this could well be part of a bigger revitalization.

Cutting off the fat of the company, bringing in new properties _with the
intention of keeping them alive_ , changing the company dynamics to make it a
better place to work, bringing in more talent and having a much more youthful
outlook on things... These are all good things.

It remains to be seen whether or not Yahoo can perform this transition but
things look good for them, if they stick to their guns and simply improve
Tumblr without lowering its value to the community, I can see a real future
for Yahoo, one where it isn't just irrelevant, but where it makes it's _own_
products and creates _new and exciting_ applications.

What I really want to see, is whether Yahoo is capable of making the move to
generation XI and what it brings to the table now it's finally left the time
warp it was stuck in.

~~~
citricsquid
A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent
cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working
from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for
that.

~~~
ajays
You must be new around here (said in jest).

HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias
keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be
there.

~~~
aetimmes
If Google continues its current growth trajectory and Yahoo! sticks around, I
wonder how long it will be before people start rooting for Yahoo! as the
"underdog".

~~~
andy_boot
Given the sizes of those 2 companies. I'd vote for <https://duckduckgo.com/>
to be the ideal underdog.

------
btipling
Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr.
Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never
caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not
seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr
beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users
that lead to success. Admittedly it did seem like a bit of an uphill struggle
since Tumblr got started a little earlier? Maybe that's it. Tumblr and
Posterous were a new kind of microblog platform a couple of years ago, now
Tumblr is massive and Posterious is dead.

Another thing that seems interesting to me is that whenever someone exits into
an acquisition it's like this space becomes open again for new startups.
Someone should make a new microblogging platform that now disrups
Tumblr/Yahoo. It's kind of like the dragon Ouroboros, eating its own tail,
around here sometimes.

~~~
Swizec
Porn. Tumblr has porn.

As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

~~~
benjamincburns
That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places
where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a
predictor of platform success/failure...

 __Edit __: Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a
decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very
low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of
consumers. From my experience in non-profit oceanographic research, nothing
focuses an engineering effort like trying to succeed on a shoestring budget
(wow, I never thought that'd compare to working in the porn industry).

~~~
paganel
> but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform
> success/failure...

For better or worse, FB could be a good example of "platform success" that
partially relies on that. It's not porn per se, just beach/bikini photos of
one's lady-friends, or his work-mates, or the wife's friends.

~~~
frozenport
Perhaps, but what do think of the JCPenny catalog?

~~~
wcfields
Proves the point: No JCPenney Catalog, profits falling, oust the new CEO.

------
jordn
I do like how this article from yahoo finance has this heading and subheading:

    
    
      Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr
      Promises not to screw it up
    

Fair enough. That probably is most people's biggest concern and expectation of
what Yahoo will do.

~~~
venomsnake
Does yahoo have a good track record of acquiring services and not frakking
them up? Not a troll question, I stopped using yahoo in 1999 but for the
occasional openid.

~~~
quarterto
They didn't screw up Flickr. Then again, they didn't do _anything_ with
Flickr.

~~~
freehunter
They kind of did screw up Flickr, just by virtue of letting it stagnate. They
got lucky in that no one else really made anything better in the meantime.

~~~
geoffw8
...and then Instagram

~~~
UVB-76
...not to mention Facebook took over as the place for most people to share
photos with their friends

~~~
freehunter
I don't think Flickr and Facebook/Instragram really compete, except in the
situation where people didn't need Flickr but Facebook/Instagram didn't exist
yet. Flickr is more for professional photographers, not a social network for
youths to share their photos with their group. If Flickr loses professional
photogs, then they're hurting. But they haven't yet.

Instagram is not going to replace Flickr for Flickr's core audience.

~~~
UVB-76
I think flickr gradually _became_ a place "more for professional
photographers" as the rest of its uses were eroded by other social media
sites.

------
mysterywhiteboy
I don't work for Yahoo, but I must say I would seriously consider working
there now with Marissa Mayer at the helm.

Mayer appears to be doing everything she can to drag Yahoo back to being
relevant, and to me that sounds like an interesting (and potentially
rewarding) challenge.

I just hope she is looking for innovation from within as well as from
acquisitions.

~~~
camus
On the contrary i would seriously consider getting another job because i would
feel like the management is totally broken.

Yahoo is not going to be relevant again because they bought Tumblr. They cant
even make their own product relevant.

I cant even understand why anybody would buy Tumblr 1 billion or more.

Dailymotion would have been a good deal, this service is relevant and people
are starting to be willing to pay to watch videos. They could have bought
loads of usefull stuff for 1 billion.

To me it just feels like a publicity stunt to make the stock go higher for a
few days , but what is the long term strategy ?

At that rate Mayer will be out in 1 year from now.

~~~
venomsnake
Well yahoo has things to offer to the tumblr team - a lot of technical and
scalability know how. I won't be surprised if they are able to shave operating
costs a lot and utilize better the labor force.

The problem is that the valuable asset of tumblr are its users. And users are
fickle bunch.

~~~
w1ntermute
Cutting costs is nice and all, but these are Internet companies. It's expected
that an acquisition will bring about much more substantial synergies than they
would for the merger of two ketchup companies.

------
mattquiros
> Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up

That line is a winner. Hahaha. It's a good thing though that they recognize
the general sentiment that they do tend to screw up the products they acquire.

Also, TechCrunch reports that the price is $1.1B
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/its-official-yahoo-is-
buyin...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/its-official-yahoo-is-buying-
tumblr-for-1-1b-promises-to-keep-it-independent/)

------
bobofett
Off the cusp, $1.1 billion seems like a staggering amount of money to pay for
yet another content hub. My gut is screaming that this is sure to go down as a
horrible waste of capital. Yahoo has much stronger footing in open source than
many other companies. They still have a vague sense of coolness about them,
and I feel they're pissing away a ton of money for no reason here. First they
prevent employees from working at home, stomping out what could've blossomed
into at the very least a novel and progressive work model. Now a billion for
tumblr. What in the actual fuck are they thinking? What is the long term
strategy here for Yahoo?

They'd get more out of their money by selecting 1,000 open source projects on
GitHub at random, and investing $1M into each.

------
nicholassmith
'Promises not to screw it up'. I think Yahoo are keenly aware people are
expecting them to fail _badly_ at this, and want to try head it off at the
pass.

So Yahoo now has Mayer running the ship, and Karp involved ostensibly with
Tumblr but I'd wager he'd have some input with the direction of Yahoo. He
comes across as being a smart, focused guy in profiles, so he might have some
bearing on where Yahoo is going.

------
neya

        The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.
    

A closer look:

    
    
       "to create advertising opportunities...that enhance the user experience."
    

Yahoo, Seriously?

~~~
dabeeeenster
You can argue (half reasonably I think) that a more targeted advert is better
for the user...

~~~
d23
I certainly enjoy them a lot more. I saw an ad for an inexpensive VPS service
on Facebook a few days ago that I wouldn't have heard about otherwise. It's a
lot better than random Vistaprint ads.

------
fosap
It seems to me they tried to buy a young and hip userbase. MySpace was once
young and hip. It was where all the bands were. Tumblr is young, but not hip
in any way. It's full of strange and not particular "social" (as in
communicating and influencing the mainstream alot) people. Tumblr is full of
(besides pron) homestuck fandom and feminists. It's full of some subcultures
that are ridiculed by the mainstream (like MLP fans) and passive aggressive
tweens. I'm not sure if Yahoo wanted that.

~~~
Crake
Yeah, seriously. My first reaction was, "Wait, you _wanted_ this userbase?"

Yahoo is so unhip that they don't even realize what they've gotten themselves
into, probably.

I'm sure some sane people have blogs on tumblr, but they're vastly outnumbered
by the "social justice" retards who think that screaming about how all
straight white men should be auschwitzed for their sins is some sort of
legitimate activism. (Where sins = having been born.)

A lot of the tumblr community's response to the acquisition has been downright
hilarious, naturally. They're pretty offended that someone bought "their"
blogs without their permission. Any explanation of how the world works is, of
course, met with accusations of "privilege" and shouting about how the
poster/yahoo/etc is trying to "oppress" their precious PEE-OH-CEES.

------
smountcastle
Wow, so does this make Marco Arment a millionaire? Apparently he still has a
financial stake in Tumblr: <http://qr.ae/pKNI7>

~~~
MojoJolo
I always believe that Marco is already a millionaire with his blog and
Instapaper earnings. But I'm curious how much of Tumblr he and David still
owns.

~~~
shanelja
I read somewhere on HN yesterday that David still had a 25% share, though I
can't find the link so no citation unfortunately.

------
wahsd
I am genuinely confused about something because my realization does not
coincide with my previous held beliefs. So I would appreciate if someone else
could validate or make a good argument for why I am wrong.

These companies, especially the biggest ones and the ones that are acquired by
them; they all seem to have one thing in common. They are all not at all about
what they built, but, once you control for the variables, what you are left
with is that it all comes down to users. These acquisitions have zero interest
in the "product" as it is rarely unique or even innovative (image filters,
"micro"-blogging, task management, etc.); it is all about acquiring the users.

Is there anything that could point to these and most other acquisitions not
being solely about the users. I find it hard to believe that Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Yahoo, etc couldn't build what are, essentially, usually, rather
simple technologies.

It seems like it all comes down to the human factor and that changing versus
creating new habits is rather difficult and costly, i.e., more than $1 billion
dollars costly.

Sorry for the redundancy. I had to throw it together while being interrupted
with work. Damn work.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I think you're spot on. Cloning the technologies is relatively easy. But
getting attention is a hard problem.

As a general rule, companies rarely[0] win because of superior technology.
Rather, they win because they use their tech in a way that provides superior
value to their users.

This is something all aspiring entrepreneurs should keep in mind. Nobody cares
if your company uses incredibly elegant code or highly sophisticated Machine
Learning/NLP/Functional Programming/whatever. All users care about is whether
your product provides value. And remember that "value" is highly subjective-
_you_ may not think that Facebook is useful, but many people will disagree
with you.

[0]: there are certainly exceptions. If you know that the problem you're
solving has major market demand, then you can win with superior execution.
Viaweb is a good example, as pg tells it they won mostly because they could
roll out features much faster than their competitors.

------
oddshocks
"75 million more each day" -- those aren't "blog posts", those are expulsions
of reposted Internet content, perhaps with an additional comment

------
janlukacs
Don't get it why people are bitchin' about this so much. From what i
understand Tumblr was running out of money so there was no other way out for
them and their users.

So we have option: a) cry about it online all day, make petitions ... and the
whole system closes in a couple of months and you end up with nothing OR b)
yahoo buys it and the site lives on

~~~
sliverstorm
People en-mass are often short-sighted, self destructive, and like to feel
like victims. I'm sure they would have been perfectly happy with option A.

------
selamattidur
It's terrific that Tumblr and its investors get to make a lot of money.

I just don't understand all this talk about Tumblr remaining independent of
Yahoo. Yahoo is mostly a pretty stagnant company that needs new ideas and ways
of thinking and doing business. Tumblr offers that opportunity - making the
central point of interaction a user-defined dashboard rather than an overly-
programmed portal that fewer and fewer people visit out of inertia.

Sure, let Tumblr be Tumblr so you don't scare off its audience. But unless
Yahoo itself becomes more like Tumblr, what's the use of spending $1.1
billion?

------
blantonl
If it was an acquhire they paid 5.8 million for each employee (187 employees).
If it was to capture their revenue stream, they paid 85 dollars for every one
dollar of revenue generated last year (13 million).

------
tommoor
Wow - this came out of nowhere! How did they keep it so quiet until now?

------
adharmad
Here is Tumblr user's reaction to being acquired by yahoo:
<http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yahoo>

~~~
ihsw
The largest concerns seem to center around: Yahoo attempting to make Tumblr
family-friendly, re-branding Tumblr into a Yahoo property, and where David
Karp is going to be (now and in the future).

------
thegna
Ask HN: who is the biggest winner in the Yahoo-Tumblr merger?

David Karp?

Marco Arment?

Marissa mayer?

Union Square Ventures?

Greylock Partners?

Sequoia Capital?

~~~
lleims
New York City

~~~
jskonhovd
The same way the Groupon IPO was good for Chicago?

------
methehack
If there is any interest, I'm trying to start a meta discussion on successful
acquisitions. I'm genuinely interested in examples, as I can think of none:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738288>. All the ones I've been part of
(five now), have been total crap.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Youtube. Android. Applied Semantics. That L.A. co that became Adsense or
Adwords. Google Maps, I believe. Writely (Google Word). That Israeli co that
became Google Sheets. Somewhat Blogger and many more just for Google.

------
anuraj
Can yahoo repair the broken email experience?

Can yahoo repair the broken Flickr experience?

Can yahoo do some interesting product that delight users?

If not, what is the point?

------
agotterer
I hope this isn't a silly question... Reports say that tumblr is running low
on cash and could only afford to operate for the next few months. This deal is
going to take a few months (article says next quarter) to close. Is it not
possible that they would run out of money before the deal officially closes?

~~~
lifeformed
I'm sure Yahoo could help them out with that.

~~~
randomsearch
Indeed. This seems to be the motivation behind the sale. I'm sure David Karp
would have liked to keep tumblr independent, despite the huge payday, but it
seems to me that he failed to develop a cohesive business model.

I loved the focus he put on the market sector he was serving, and I share his
hatred of intrusive advertising, but he didn't present a realistic
alternative. It's a shame - we keep losing innovative businesses that don't
think enough about long-term business models, so we have to hop onto the next
big thing until it too gets snapped up. Much as I dislike Facebook, you have
to respect Zuckerberg for not selling out... at least he's tried to build
something sustainable.

------
pvnick
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. Now is a very exciting time to
work for yahoo.

------
stevewilhelm
"We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t
changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing." - D. Karp

Spending 1.1 billion on a company that says it's "not turning purple" may have
some impact on morale in Sunnyvale and on Wall St.

~~~
philsnow
YouTube didn't grow primary colors when it got adsorbed by the GOOG.

I think there's precedent for letting a subsidiary group retain its own
branding and culture, and for that to not cause morale to drop.

------
ancarda
Does anyone know a tumblr-like service that's open-source that I can stick on
my server (Nginx/PHP-FPM/MySQL).

I should point out WordPress is far too heavy for a Raspberry Pi, I need
something lightweight.

~~~
jof
Jekyll? There's not much more than a repo and text files on the admin side,
but enables super-fast blogging on light hardware.

------
captn3m0
Does anybody here think that this is a good deal for Yahoo?

~~~
wilfra
It'll take at least a year before we have any idea. For now, just grab the
popcorn. It's going to be fun to watch.

Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram.
Now it's probably worth several times that...

~~~
shawabawa3
> Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram.
> Now it's probably worth several times that...

Is it though? As far as I can tell it still has $0 revenue.

------
kmfrk
What happened to that alleged Flickr press event today? Is that a thing that's
going to happen?

------
6cxs2hd6
I'm curious to see where the integration ends up on the spectrum of mergr vs.
yacquisition.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
To be clear, I'm not just word-playing.

Will Yahoo smother Tumblr with integration projects like single sign-in,
leaving insufficient resources to do anything new? Or will it be benign
neglect? Or will they actually invest in it as a social platform (instead of
as a database like they did with Flickr)?

With new CEO, hopefully bad history won't repeat.

------
pknerd
_Promises not to screw it up_

Yes, they promise they won't screw it up __Officially __

------
B-Scan
It looks that lot of their users don't like that idea:

[http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-yahoo-from-buying-
tu...](http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-yahoo-from-buying-tumblr/)

Disclosure: I work for iPetitions.

~~~
nicholassmith
I like how reactionary that is, much like when people expected Instagram to
suddenly gain pokes and sidebar ads when Facebook bought them. It may as well
say 'WE DON'T LIKE CHANGE'.

~~~
Afal
Kinda reminds me when Kraft was about to acquire Cadbury there were thousands
(Ok not literally but there was quite a bit of noise) of facebook groups
saying that this shouldn't happen because "the chocolate will taste like
dairylea cheese" as if Toblerone wasn't a thing that Kraft made.

It's funny how when there's news of a company acquiring another people think
straight away that it'll change drastically and overnight, making the huge
assumption that the company is A) going to change anything B) doesn't know
that changing something will break trust with users making their billion
dollar purchase useless.

Or maybe Yahoo will change things on tumblr who knows? I'd like Yahoo to add a
feature to change your primary blog on tumblr. That would be nice to have..

------
dschiptsov
Such a classic exit - "and then sell it to Yahoo"..)

------
pknerd
I hope it's fate will not be similar to Posterous.

------
gdonelli
"our promise not to screw it up"

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cbolat
Hope they'll keep promises

------
dmourati
stumblr

