Tumblr acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion, gets sold to WordPress for < $20 M in 2019. Thoughts?
Google
sbsjsj
Aug 13
309 Comments
What went wrong here? Facebook did a good job with Instagram. Microsoft did a good job with LinkedIn. Was Tumblr overvalued at $1.1B ??
comments
The best performing female CEOs are
Marilynn Hewson from Lockheed Martin, Debra Cafaro from Ventas and Nancy Mckinstry from Wolters Kluwer.
WordPress and blogging are very much alive and kicking butts.
(I just realized I haven’t used the word WYSIWYG since 2004 😂)
🖕
Instant resignation from me. I'm more productive at home & work longer hours.
Just saying ...
https://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-mayers-yahoo-acqu-1781980352
Anyone who was using Tumblr for the image sharing features had instagram to turn to, and anyone using tumblr for the nice, easily shared text/blog functionality just switched over to Medium.
The next two weeks, they had started comms that they’d decommission all NSFW content aka porn from the site.
Is Verizon republican?
Longer version
Instagram only had images when they started to monetize it and advertisers had a really low bar to entry to start running ads: Create a profile and post a cool picture with a short description. Tumblr had a bunch of different types of posts, from quotes to full articles to video, and they really tried to encourage content creators and advertisers to have really curated, creative spaces. Stated differently, Tumblr wanted advertisers to turn their blogs into fully curated homes on the internet. Most brands/advertisers were typically outsourcing their “social” advertising to agencies and other 3rd parties and maintaining a Tumblr presence was expensive and didn’t provide the best ROI. Karp was able to keep a fair amount of autonomy with product direction, but not sales. With his autonomy he pushed back and prevented simplifying the advertiser’s experience for Tumblr, which ultimately killed adoption. Moreover, Yahoo only had a limited number of advertisers who were advertising with them and most of those advertisers were really big brands. Facebook had over a million different advertisers who were already set up to run on FB and it was fairly seamless to start introducing that demand into the Instagram supply—lots of the demand was smaller business who loved having their ads show up within Instagram. Finally, add in the risk of ads being shown on a Tumblr user’s dashboard surrounded by porn and it was really a tough conversation for our sales force.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/gillette-loses-billions-by-shaming-men/
I would be absolutely flabbergasted if they lost more than, say, $1000 of business for the ads. They just weren't anti men. You had to really stretch to be insulted. Ads rarely cause people to buy less of a product. Much as you might hate add companies they know what they're doing.
Re: 3B that could've been give back to the shareholders via buy backs. As the loss of Tumblr had shown if yahoo was going to fail best to start giving money back
Yahoo was in a shitty state before Marissa. She was not a factor at all. Worse errors were made than buying Tumblr. Did the 10 other CEOs before do something better? Jerry Yang made a critical error in hiring Terry Semel a media guy instead of a tech person early on and ceded to Google and then that horrible deal where they sold search to Microsoft sealed it. Selling alibab early was a 40B dollar mistake. No better, was the dork that followed Tim.A; better at politicking than at execution. Quickly realized what a challenge he got himself into. Got himself fired in less than a year. Truth is fixing Yahoo was always going to be a losing proposition for anyone that took that job.
“Worst ceo”. Disagree but dont need to rehash this.
She refused to fix anything on the backend”. That is untrue. I actually happen to know Alex Stamos.