According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo . That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product and with no forced integration with Yahoo’s other many content properties. That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities. “At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.” While that’s is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for both Tumblr employees, as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service. That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site , although they believe it to be fixable over time. As Peter Kafka noted: To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff. By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn. Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard follower model, opt-in.” Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — ok, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition and how the new ownership would impact him and the service. One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal back when and what a mess that was!) Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs. That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that advertising online made him physically sick. Still, he has begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr recently. Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise.
Read MoreThe Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr. Sources close to the board said the deal was a foregone conclusion and was an unanimous vote by the Silicon Valley Internet giant. The deal will be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources. AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the price and the board meeting that took place today earlier this week . There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based hipster blogging service. As part of the deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who got a windfall of cash from the deal — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain much control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure. Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with the hip New York-based blogging site, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that buying Tumblr was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.” And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to huge growth. According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly that the fast-growing content site, turbocharged by mountains of user-generated content, was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new audiences. Yahoo is looking to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use
Read Moremama_mia/Shutterstock Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO. Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be. The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “ long-term investments ,”- products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis. Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon. Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making which aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home. And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing . And as of last week, just over one million people have installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network. What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas . Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, only runs on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years. Home isn’t the only long-term bet
Read MoreI came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. – Andrew Mason , in a personal blog post about what he’s been up to
Read MoreI came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. – Andrew Mason , in a personal blog post about what he’s been up to
Read MoreI came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. – Andrew Mason , in a personal blog post about what he’s been up to
Read MoreTwo weeks ago, new posters began appearing at the headquarters of Facebook Inc. The posters proclaimed: “Advertisers are users too*.” At the bottom of the page, in smaller font, was the phrase “*no srsly,” Internet shorthand for “no seriously.” On the eve of Facebook’s IPO anniversary Saturday, how the Menlo Park, Calif., company tackles revenue is one of the biggest challenges in its short life as a public company. After eight years of focusing on user growth, Facebook has pushed revenue up its priority list and restructured its business so that many of its best minds are now thinking about driving sales. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreEarlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr. Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught. But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp. But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million. In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders. Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site. But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use. “If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source. That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo. Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts.
Read MoreJelly, the stealthy startup founded by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, announced Thursday that the company just closed its Series A round of venture capital. The round was led by Spark Capital, and Bijan Sabet — an early Twitter investor — will join Jelly’s board. Other noteworthy investors include Jack Dorsey, U2′s Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, Roya Mahboob, Greg Yaitanes and former Vice President Al Gore.
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