Tumblr’s employees will also do well. The company’s first 10 employees will receive an average of $6.2 million in cash; the first 30 will receive an average of $3.3 million in cash, and the rest of the 178 employees will each receive $371,000.
However, in a comment on Hacker News, Union Square’s principal, Fred Wilson, calls the numbers offered by PrivCo ”total garbage.” “There is not one fact in this privco thing that is close to right,” he continues. “The numbers are good but nowhere close to that good. This is the same firm that predicted Foursquare would be out of business this year which will also prove to be nonsense.”
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr report
At the 41 second mark!
Congrats to PCB, and that interview had painfully obvious talking points. Stephanopoulos called Karp a hipster, leading to awkwardness all around.
13% of internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr.
Compare Tumblr user demographics to other social networking sites: http://pewrsr.ch/VBAYby
Hey Pew, can you break this down into Dr. Who fans vs. Arrested Development fans for us, and see where the audiences overlap? Thanks.
Buying Tumblr is a big enough deal for Yahoo that they clearly aren’t intending to ruin it or shut it down — like YouTube and Google, Tumblr will probably become an extremely important part of Yahoo indefinitely. And I believe they’ll do a good job with it. Yahoo today is a very different company than the Yahoo that neglected Flickr for years — it has extremely competent new leadership making bold changes. (Including fixing Flickr.)
More importantly, it gives David, and the rest of Tumblr’s team, the freedom to continue making the best product they can while offloading a lot of the grunt work to Yahoo’s leadership, staff, and infrastructure.
As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.
Side note: If you haven’t seen it yet, the new Flickr redesign is ace.
Yumblr? What Some Of Tumblr’s Best Bloggers Think About Yahoo’s $1.1 Billion Purchase
I’m quoted in this. — Ernie @ SFB
“The 24 Most Melodramatic Pieces Of Yahoo/Tumblr Fanart” should be enough to make you question if you’re really that angry about this buyout, when you see how many people are far angrier than you.
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!
We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and…
Note to Yahoo: If you post images in text posts, they don’t look as good on the dashboard as straight-up image posts. You guys are new here, so we’ll give you some time to get used to things.
There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based hipster blogging service.Kara Swisher needs to stop calling Tumblr a hipster blogging service. (Oh, and she says the deal was unanimously approved. On a side note, TechCrunch suggests that the reason why Tumblr accepted the lower deal is because many of their executives have departed in recent months.)
obitoftheday asks: What do you think happens if Yahoo buys Tumblr? And why do we all agree that it seems like a bad idea?
» SFB says: I think Tumblr starts monetizing itself more effectively. For years they’ve tried to do everything but the obvious, but the problem is, they’ve turned down a lot of good ideas as a result.
(Comparison: WordPress.com has succeeded at profitability by both offering paid premium features and revenue sharing-style advertising for bloggers—both things Tumblr has chosen not to do, but could arguably do better than WordPress if it chose to do so. Nobody really complains about Wordpress’ ads. Think that might be because they created a context for it that didn’t bug users?)
But this could come at the cost of a very strong community. I know of one heavily-active user I liked reading, The Callus, who has quit Tumblr and deleted all of his posts as a result of the whiff of a rumor of this buyout happening. I don’t think you or anyone else should follow suit, but that’s what people are doing.
As for the “bad idea” chunk of your questions, the problem is this: Yahoo has a reputation for letting acquisitions flounder under its corporate structure. Even the big ones. Delicious, for example, was nearly shut down before the founders of YouTube swooped in and saved it. And Yahoo has also tried the user-generated market before, including with Geocities and Yahoo Meme (which was effectively Yahoo’s failed attempt to create a Tumblr clone). Yahoo has a long list of discontinued products. And while Laurie Voss has a good point about Flickr, there’s a better point here: Building a community with integrity is tough, and change at the top can ruin everything if done the wrong way. I can understand why people might be worried. I’m worried, too. — Ernie @ SFB
P.S.: One key line from the story we linked last night: “sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left.” Who knows if that’s true, but this is a company that unceremoniously fired its editorial team recently—a move that could be seen in a different light considering that line, though that’s speculative. Tumblr can’t run on dreams and reblogs and investor money forever. Something has to change on the business front to ensure the likes can keep coming. That change can come from the inside, but the change can come more easily from an exit.
obitoftheday asks: What do you think happens in Yahoo buys Tumblr? And why do we all agree that it seems like a bad idea?
(EDIT: On reader request, here’s a rebloggable version of this.)
» SFB says: I think Tumblr starts monetizing itself more effectively. For years they’ve tried to do everything but the obvious, but the problem is, they’ve turned down a lot of good ideas as a result.
(Comparison: WordPress.com has succeeded at profitability by both offering paid premium features and revenue sharing-style advertising for bloggers—both things Tumblr has chosen not to do, but could arguably do better than WordPress if it chose to do so. Nobody really complains about Wordpress’ ads. Think that might be because they created a context for it that didn’t bug users?)
But this could come at the cost of a very strong community. I know of one heavily-active user I liked reading, The Callus, who has quit Tumblr and deleted all of his posts as a result of the whiff of a rumor of this buyout happening. I don’t think you or anyone else should follow suit, but that’s what people are doing.
As for the “bad idea” chunk of your questions, the problem is this: Yahoo has a reputation for letting acquisitions flounder under its corporate structure. Even the big ones. Delicious, for example, was nearly shut down before the founders of YouTube swooped in and saved it. And Yahoo has also tried the user-generated market before, including with Geocities and Yahoo Meme (which was effectively Yahoo’s failed attempt to create a Tumblr clone). Yahoo has a long list of discontinued products. And while Laurie Voss has a good point about Flickr, there’s a better point here: Building a community with integrity is tough, and change at the top can ruin everything if done the wrong way. I can understand why people might be worried. I’m worried, too. — Ernie @ SFB
P.S.: One key line from the story we linked last night: “sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left.” Who knows if that’s true, but this is a company that unceremoniously fired its editorial team recently—a move that could be seen in a different light considering that line, though that’s speculative. Tumblr can’t run on dreams and reblogs and investor money forever. Something has to change on the business front to ensure the likes can keep coming. That change can come from the inside, but the change can come more easily from an exit.
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
I am super bored of hearing this.
Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.
In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the world’s biggest photo-sharing site, and tagged photos was key to its early growth, something Flickr didn’t add until 2007)
But that’s in retrospect. In 2005, it wasn’t at all clear what to do. Everyone in the industry was still feeling the burn of gigantic, unprofitable acquisitions prior to the great crash of 2001, so paying money for an barely-profitable site like Flickr still seemed like madness, even within Yahoo. So Yahoo focussed on making it profitable — and succeeded, which is no mean feat.
Could Flickr have done better staying independent? Absolutely no way.
And the way you can tell that for sure is that they let Yahoo acquire them. It’s not like Yahoo in 2005 had a great reputation; the only reason you’d do it is if you were out of money and out of options. In 2005, nobody was going to give Flickr the hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital they needed and hope for the best: it was exit or die.
On top of the bare financial reality, it is an open secret at Yahoo (my former employer) that Flickr’s internals are and have always been an architectural nightmare. They had no idea how to scale and needed huge investment just to dig themselves out of the technical debt they’d accrued. It could have been better, sure, but without Yahoo it would have been much, much worse.
Yahoo didn’t kill Flickr; Yahoo saved Flickr from itself.
Here’s a lesser-heard take on the Yahoo/Tumblr thing from Laurie Voss, who is a former Yahoo employee and has some good insight on the matter as a result.
I for one welcome our new Yahoo overlords.
The most concrete confirmation of what’s about to happen yet: “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.’”
Good news everyone. Something is probably going to happen that you may not like. Whatever it is will get announced this coming Monday.
soon
YOLO!
If Microsoft tries to acquire them it’d be Mumblr.
If Facebook tries to acquire them it’d be Fumblr.
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