Yahoo (YHOO) Stock: Company Buys Tumblr For $1.1 Billion

The demise of Tumblr is upon us. Yahoo has agreed to buy Tumblr for a $1.1 billion all cash acquisition. The WallStreetJournal reported that the Yahoo board had approved the deal on Sunday, May 19.  

In 2007, after Yahoo purchased Flickr, they made everybody get a Yahoo account in order to use the service. Quickly, Flickr became something quite different from what its original creators intended it to be. The community they had worked so hard to build was dismantled. As Gizmodo pointed out, Yahoo butchered Flickr to death but actively killed it by not creating a viable app for use with a mobile device. The only way to get your image to Flickr was via e-mail. Eventually when an app was created, it was a total freaking disaster. 

Despite pleas from the internet, Flickr is still lacking in awesome. (photo via: The Atlantic)

Tumblr chief executive, David Karp is no fan of advertising. He’s been outspoken on his opinion of adverts on social-media platforms. As Tumblr grew though, the team had no choice but to open it up to ads last year, generating some $13 million in profit. Now Tumblr has 117 million unique users. See, everyone is just really afraid that Tumblr is going to end up looking like this:

Photo via Tumblr

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has been trying to revive the image of the company since joining it last summer. Tumblr’s users are young, innovative, and have posted over 50.6 billion images. Mayer desperately wants to appeal to the young folk!

Above: Demonstration of how Yahoo's aquisition is viewed by Tumblr's young user base via DigitalTrends.

The only thing Yahoo sees when it looks at Tumblr is dollar signs. If I were to ever think of Yahoo, which I never do, the only thing I see is a terrible purple text and ugly font staring back at me. The overcrowded, dysfunctional home page is everything Tumblr is not. Tumblr was built on the principal of minimalism, something I don’t even think Yahoo has in its vernacular. I’m bombarded by ads and links to other ads, and twenty-gagillion personal Y! Sites that I don’t give a shit about. 

Photo of Yahoo Homepage: What the F am I even looking at?!

Yahoo has said that Tumblr will run as an independent site and Mayer has agreed to let Karp run the site with some level of autonomy. I wonder if they fed Flickr the same line? 

Gif set via Tumblr