
Is Tumblr the new Geocities? - tristan_louis
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/05/18/is-tumblr-the-new-geocities/
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jiggy2011
They could have saved themselves a billion by not abandoning geocities. It had
huge traction at one point but it just never moved with the times.

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jstalin
Anyone fooling themselves and thinking "It'll be different this time," is in
for disappointment. Of course Tumblr is the next Geocities. Yahoo is a public
company that won't tolerate the freedom that Tumblr offers.

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yuhong
With the new Marissa Mayer CEO?

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adventured
Mayer is cobbling together a new set of Yahoo properties via acquisition, but
that won't change the perception of Yahoo with younger demographics.

Yahoo's problem is that they have no gorilla products. They have no big,
dominant product/s, that generates billions in revenue, and is still growing
at double digits. There's no core to what Yahoo is, so they're on a perpetual
treadmill of buying other sites / services to replace dying sites (eg Tumblr
for Geocities). So long as you're buying other sites to supply your core,
you'll always be running behind (not to mention it requires incredible vision
to buy the right sites / companies).

The history of the Web says that the dominant players all have gorilla core
products that provide moats.

Go to Yahoo.com and tell me what you see... it's still a boring portal from
1999. They're not the leader in search. They're not the leader in social.
They're not the leader in mobile. They're not the leader in cloud services (eg
AWS / Azure / App Engine etc). They're not the leader in image hosting /
sharing or streaming video or music. They're not the leader in email. They're
not the leader in web gaming / social gaming.

So Mayer is going to buy Tumblr, which will chase off their most loyal users.
Then Yahoo is going to have to figure out how to pay for the billion dollar
acquisition, which will chase off even more users. And in the end, the best
value they can ever derive from Tumblr will be portal style integration with
yahoo properties, which is something they could have gotten in a simple deal.

A lot of people are looking at Flickr as a reference point to this deal. Yahoo
paid $35 million for Flickr, and it had a functional business model that is
still alive today.

This is a bad joke on Yahoo shareholders.

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msabalau
Yahoo doesn't necessarily have to bolt onto Tumblr onto a dying core, one
option would be to milk yahoo.com (and leverage whatever synergies exist) to
invest in Tumblr as a new and seperate replacement core.

Maybe not likely, and maybe not enough "there there" to build an appropriate
sized business around.

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xur17
I really hope they don't try to bolt it onto their existing site. Like you
said, I think they'd be wise to grow it separately.

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qwerta
I think it boils down how Yahoo manages to integrate it into its portfolio. I
really hope they succeed somehow. Internet could use some more competition.

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mkoble11
_I really hope they succeed somehow. Internet could use some more
competition._

When they announced Marissa as taking over, I just wasn't sure _anyone_ could
steer that company in the right direction. Perhaps maybe it was just better
left for dead.

However, I've been impressed by the moves she's making & believe she's going
to turn it around. I'm rooting for her to succeed.

It takes guts to build your own company. It's just as ballsy (if not more so)
to climb aboard a sinking ship, get out your pail and start moving buckets of
water, one by one.

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quackerhacker
I'm really hoping Yahoo the best. Although they have no products, that I'm
aware of at least, that I'm using, I have used Tumblr briefly. Like some
others here, when I heard Mayer was appointed as CEO from Google.

I thought that was awesome for the company, and even though some of the devs
didn't like the HR changes, it does show her commitment to change that is
badly needed.

What I will give Yahoo the biggest credit they deserve is that THEY ARE making
headlines and becoming a common topic of discussion. I just really hope that
Yahoo does cultivate Tumblr (even though I think the acquisition is over
priced to make headlines) and carve a strong niche as a bloggers goto
solution, and that the users don't start a mass exodus.

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satori99
> Although they have no products, that I'm aware of at least, that I'm using

Do you know anyone who does? Every time I see their name is a headline, I am
mildy suprised that they are still relevant at all.

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jckt
A lot of people still use a yahoo email. I suppose when they first got their
email, it was supposedly better than hotmail (gmail hasn't even come out yet),
and they haven't bothered to change since because, really, it's _good enough_.
Yahoo messenger too, I guess. And probably a lot of people have yahoo as their
homepage (for some reason...wonder why!) and never bothered to switch it to
something else more sensible. That might explain how yahoo.com is still top 5
on Alexa[1].

[1]: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com>

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quackerhacker
You actually bring up a great point about the Yahoo's homepage.

I think I remember a while ago that Yahoo's homepage was automatically set
when I bought a new laptop....you know the bundleware crap that laptop makers
have set when you buy a pc laptop.

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nkorth
Geocities? From the first time I saw someone recommend pasting some javascript
in the Description box, I knew Tumblr was the new Myspace.

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Draco6slayer
And here I was thinking New Myspace was the New Myspace :D.

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drharris
Naw, New Myspace is Old Friendster.

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randall
No Boo.com reference? [1]

The OP has a lot of knowledge about the dot-com bust, and is a smart dude.
It's unsurprising he sees it through this lens, though I don't quite see it
the same way. Marissa Mayer has a better sense for product (from my POV) than
Jerry Yang / whoever was running Yahoo in 1999.

That said, it's still interesting to hear how the dot-com survivors view the
current crop of net companies.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com>

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akadien
Yahoo is like HP. They once had pretty great engineering and relevance, but
they are a zombie company now. If I were a Yahoo shareholder, I'd be pretty
pissed about this deal.

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dreen
In terms of content/overall quality, yes, Tumblr and others like Blogger and
(less) Wordpress.com are what Geocities used to be.

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invig
Sensationalist speculation much?

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ihuman
The story is too new to do anything but speculate.

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obviouslygreen
I disagree. There's something else people could do: Wait for real data.

Of course this doesn't mesh with the "we have to write something or no one
will have anything to click on and we won't get any ad revenue" angle, but my
point is that "too new to do anything but speculate" implies something _needs
to be done_.

