

Yahoo said to be mulling investment in, or acquisition of, Tumblr - chinmoy
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/16/yahoo-mulling-1-billion-tumblr-acquisition/

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bruceb
Yahoo doesn't seem to do too well with its acquisitions. The startups seem to
shut down or flatline.

Tumblr is hip and all but what makes it that valuable? is there something I am
missing?

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minimaxir
Pageviews. Lots of them.

Of course, Tumblr has no revenue, but when has that ever mattered in
acquisitions? :)

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danso
But are there _really_ a lot of _pageviews_? Not from the site owners'point of
view. On my Tumblr, I've had posts that get thousands of "likes" and reblogs,
yet the Google Analytics counter reads maybe a 100 pageviews in that time
period. This is of course because my posts were engaged by users on the
dashboard.

The upshot of the dashboard dynamic is that users, at least in my case, dont
have much of an incentive to create beautiful permanent sites...just like i
dont generally care what my Twitter profile page looks like. The dashboard
dynamic also affects the content I put out...I haven't done a scientific
analysis, but I would wager that my vertically oriented photos are almost
always "liked" more than my landscape-oriented photos...not because they are
better, but because vertical photos dominate the dashboard screen area.

And so unless the dashboard is a gold mine of ad revenue, it's hard to see how
this will improve Yahoo's bottom line without some extremely clever
engineering and design...but not only that, Tumblr's social interaction model
is not as addictive as it is on Twitter and Gacebook...less interactions means
less data.

This isn't a knock on the Tumblr team...I would love it if they're able to
continue the service with a big pocketed owner...the service really changed
the way I think about blogging and content workflow...so props to them for
making a beloved product

~~~
cinquemb
> _but not only that, Tumblr's social interaction model is not as addictive as
> it is on Twitter and Gacebook...less interactions means less data._

I think the tags people use on their posts could go a long way to serving
relevant ad content in dashboard or outside of it. Also from looking around on
some blogs on tumblr,I see that people seem to mostly focus on a core group of
topics they're generally interested which I can see going a long way with
serving relevant ads.

Engineering wise, since blogs are so customizable that may have some
challenges, but I can see an automatic "ad-injector" take the same format as
the posts on a persons feed (that can't be edited in the style editor), and
insert itself (based on w/e factors such as how many posts, page views, type
of content,etc). From talking with a recruiter last summer, that may be
something much more fun for devs to tackle than trying to redo their backend.

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dmix
So, opportunity to add advertisements?

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waltz
Shut down all the things

