Tonight's Yahoo Event Was About Making Flickr 'Awesome Again'
Nitasha Tiku · 05/20/13 04:49PM
From what I can gather from the not-really-streaming livestream, the presenters had come to praise Flickr, not to bury it.
From what I can gather from the not-really-streaming livestream, the presenters had come to praise Flickr, not to bury it.
Business Insider got its hands on a pitch deck from Tumblr that promises brands will be "front and center" through in-stream ads that look like normal posts, as opposed to David Karp's insistence on restricting ads to only the "Radar" and "Spotlight" sections of the platform. But upset otherkins don't have Yahoo to blame.
Despite all the excited shouting, there's nothing particularly cheerful about Yahoo's maternal adoption of David Karp. Users are whining, investors are disappointed, pundits are ever-unimpressed, and Karp just gave up the future of his life's work for a bailout.
As Yahoo and Tumblr remembered the nineties by negotiating their deal in the press, almost every acquisition report quoted the same figure, first reported by Forbes in January: Tumblr made $13 million in revenue in 2012, with the "hope" that it would get to $100 million in 2013. But a source familiar with the company told Valleywag that Tumblr's actual revenue (not bookings) in 2012 was less than $5 million.
How many times can you confirm a piece of news? One more time! Yahoo's Marissa Mayer just announced the $1.1 billion deal over conference call and cheeky GIF-enabled press release. Yes, more ads are coming to Tumblr.
Cash! The WSJ says "the Yahoo board has approved a deal" to make this happen, and it's hard to imagine Tumblr turning this down. One of the most unpopular companies in the world will soon own one of the most popular in history, and we'll all find out if you really can buy cool.
Two years ago, Tumblr's overabundance of porn was well-documented. Today, nothing has changed: it's still a JPEG sex bonanza. Which is A-OK with us—but what would Yahoo do about the blowjobs, wrist-slitting, racism, and other advertising-unfriendly stuff?
New rumors that Yahoo is eyeing Tumblr for a mega-pricy acquisition are startling at first. It'd be an expensive, desperate plan. But if you look over the company's past, you'll see history repeating itself—and a trail of blood.
Yahoo has a problem: it has no idea what it's doing, or how it's going to do it (outside of teenage dream hires). Some people who claim intimate knowledge say the company is going to do it by throwing a serious Hail Mary in its quest for cool: buying Tumblr for $1,000,000,000. That's one billion.
Babblr is a simple idea: an IM add-on for Tumblr, so you can chat with your GIF and pro-ana pals without leaving the site. It proved to be a popular idea, too: so many people downloaded Babblr that its servers crumpled. Now the team has a solution! They're going to spam you and ask for money. Uh. No.
This ended well surprisingly fast! Jessica Bennett, formerly of Tumblr's eliminated editorial department, will be helping Sandberg spread the Lean In mantra with original "editorial and social content."
Tumblr founder David Karp's abrupt farewell to his Storyboard team earlier this month was so disingenuous, so thick with noxious doublespeak, that it hardly seemed real. That's because it wasn't: Storyboard's ousted leader ghost-wrote the news of his own firing because Karp wouldn't (or couldn't) do it. What's sweeter than making a fool of your boss on the way out?
The good news for David Karp is that he created one of the most popular things to ever sit on the internet. The bad news is that Tumblr's investors say the company is worth $800 million, and Karp says he doesn't care about making money. That could change today.
It's hard to imagine what could be worse than being fired in the same paragraph that heaps praise upon the work you've been doing. But at Tumblr, there is worse: your company shitcans you and then unveils shiny new LA real estate. What are they thinking?
Tumblr isn't a lot of things: profitable, gentle with its staff, or generally SFW. But if you ask Tumblr, it's definitely doing a lot of incredible things. An incredible number of incredible things, incredibly, according to Matt Langer, who counted every single instance of the word on the staff blog. Incredible.
Looks like Tumblr actually does sorta care about making money: mobile users will see "up to four ads per day, and they'll be differentiated with a dollar-sign icon with beams shooting out of it," reports AdAge. Subtle! Sadly, this revenue will be too late to save the editorial team Tumblr just canned.