Here are two very different scenes from last night: on the left, you have the team from Qwiki, a small video-sharing app that Yahoo! just purchased for $50 million. They're getting trashed at the top of New York's glamorously overpriced Standard Hotel. On the right, you have the people who say they're the real creators, and were screwed out of a fortune.
Greek tech investor and self-described filthy senior citizen George Polis is angry about dividends! But first, he'd like to tell you, and all Yahoo present shareholders, that he's attracted to the company's CEO. Yep, this was just as gross to listen to as we thought it'd be.
Mostly because you weren't invited, but also because there's a muzzled guard dog standing outside of it like a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall.
Starting today, you'll see things like promotional GIFs for Denny's in your web Tumblr feed (just like you had before via mobile), according to the company's staff blog. "These posts will simply blend in with the posts from the blogs you follow," says Tumblr, except that advert posts will be stamped with a dollar sign with lines shooting out of it.
The Tumblr afterglow is starting to fade, and Yahoo is back to dumping money into oddball startups without any explanation. Why? Don't ask why.
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.
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.
