Yahoo Officially Acquires Tumblr - Buy Buy Tumblr

It’s official. Tumblr has been acquired by Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. Yes, good old Tumblr with all its coolness is now the property of not so cool Yahoo. No personal grudges, but Yahoo does not have a decent history when it comes to acquisitions. Biggest example? Remember Flickr? That photo sharing platform where almost anyone who cared about their photos was present. Well apparently Yahoo bought it in 2005 and ever since, the downfall of Flickr has been inevitable. It lost its charm when startups like Instagram came and photo management became an easier affair on other social media platforms. Flickr was no longer the first choice for photo sharing.

Tumblr and the concept of micro blogging, also known as tumble logging turned out to be a rage. Why? It focused more on the content and was a model built for virality. In order to comment on a post (without external add-ons/plugins) you had to “reblog” the post with your own comments or additions.

Now, that Yahoo acquired this one of a kind social blogging platform, users all over the globe were caught up in rage. You cannot let Yahoo ruin it. Yahoo aware of the user apprehensions declared the acquisition by saying “we promise we won’t screw it up”.

At the end, what can this acquisition mean for the users and the market? We try to list it here.

• More ads: It’s Yahoo. What can you expect? Brace yourself for more advertisements on Tumblr. Dashboards, Blogs, everywhere – the more the merrier.
• Desperation for a ‘young audience’: Yahoo is ancient in terms of how the internet ages. Tumblr however is young and fresh. The acquisition of a platform like Tumblr that has around 75% of users that are ‘young’ is a slick move for Yahoo to work on the lacking user demographics in its domain.
• Monopoly in social media: We are concentrating the wealth of variety in social media into the hands of the big players. After this acquisition, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter happen to be the only independent social media platforms.
• Probably a good thing for competing blogging platforms: As the announcement of the acquisition went public, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote on his blog that the number of imports from Tumblr were reported as 72,000 instead of the usual 600-700 in one hour on a Sunday. So do the apprehensions that are kicking in mean that Tumblr’s loss will be the competitor’s gain?
• A richer high school dropout: For those who are unaware, Tumblr happens to be the creation of a high school dropout David Karp. Leaving behind the likes of Bill Gates and Zuckerberg who dropped out of college, Karp dropped out of high school at the age of 14. Today with this acquisition the 26 year old has earned around 250 million dollars personally from the deal.