Report: Fact Snapshot of What the Tumblr Acquisition Means for Yahoo

Last week, Yahoo! CEO, Marissa Mayer unveiled announced the all-cash acquisition of social media platform Tumblr. What’s more, Yahoo! chose to make the announcement a little differently – with an animated GIF! With the acquisition, Tumblr joins the $1 billion start-up club. But what does the Tumblr acquisition mean for Yahoo?

Let us see what the latest research by GlobalWebIndex.net (Q1 2013) says

Registered Users and Active Users

73 million people globally, have created a Tumblr account, which equals only 5% of the global internet population.

Active users, that is, the number of users who have used Tumblr in the past month were just under 34 million, which is just 2% of the global internet population.

Year on year (YoY), the number of active users on Tumblr have actually fallen slightly from 34.2 million in Q2 2012.

This means that Tumblr itself hasn’t grown at all from Q2 2012 to Q1 2013.

User Profile

One of the factors that probably made Tumblr an attractive prospect for Yahoo, is that a major chunk of its global user base is between the ages of 16 and 24 -  a whopping 46%! This compares to about 30% for Google+, 27% for Facebook an 29% for Twitter.

So, the Tumblr acquisition will clearly help Yahoo! engage with younger audiences.

Talent Pool

Yahoo! acquired Summly in March 2013 and got the creator, Nick D’Aloisio on board. With the Tumlbr acquisition, Yahoo! is retaining Tumblr founder David Karp as CEO. Both D’Aloisio and Karp are not only among the most talented entrepreneurs of their generation but they also have highly skilled teams that are adept at developing user friendly mobile apps and services. These skill sets will prove to be a great asset to Yahoo! in developing its mobile services that are becoming key access points for users.

If one looks at the figures below, we will find Tumblr ‘s Global Active Usage by age groups as of Q1 2013 and compare those with the Global Active Usage for that period, we can see that the Tumblr acquisition will help Yahoo reach out to a much younger user base.

With this acquisition, Yahoo! is certainly looking to expand its reach in mobile and social spheres with access to a much younger user base coupled with a talent pool built from several recent acquisitions. What remains to be seen is if it will succeed in the face of competition from Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The findings of Global WebIndex can be accessed here.