Yahoo! Buys Tumblr
Posted: May 23, 2013 by Maja Johnson
The rumors about Yahoo! buying Tumblr are finally resolved, and it turns out they were true! The Internet giant is buying the blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. According to Yahoo officials, the company will keep Tumblr as a separate independent company with its founder as CEO.
Many of the Tumblr followers got upset by the news but CEO David Karp responded immediately. He wrote that Tumblr "will pretty much remain the same and that users can only expect improvements with such a business arrangement".
Tumblr got a lot of negative remarks about its performances in the last couple of months. Many of its users complained that the video feature did not work properly. According to Karp, the positive side of having Yahoo handle support is that all these issues can be resolved very quickly. Even Marissa Mayer, the President and CEO of Yahoo, announced the mutual cooperation between the companies by registering her own Tumblr account.
Experts say that the reason behind this acquisition lies in the number of young users that Tumblr has, and Yahoo wants to get. Tumblr is probably the most popular social network for users between the ages of 18 and 25. It currently has more than 300 million registered users, and that number is rising by 120,000 each day. Yahoo expects that with Tumblr, their audience will show a significant rise; by more than a billion visitors in a month.
It looks like that both companies have a lot to gain with this purchase. Tumblr is considering this more of business strategy than a tragedy. The social network giant will use many of Yahoo's technologies like personalization and search to improve the services to their users. Both have agreed to work on advertising and improving the general experience their users have.
