It’s done, ladies and gentlemen.
As expected, Yahoo this morning announced its acquisition of blogging phenomenon Tumblr. The Internet giant has bought the six-year old New York company for “approximately $1.1 billion”, substantially all of which will be paid in cash.
The news is in line with earlier reports from AllThingsD, which first broke the news of sale talks between both parties, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Amusingly, the press release says:
“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.”
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Founder David Karp will remain at the helm as Tumblr’s CEO.
He’ll also be worth a heck of a lot more.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer even took to Tumblr to repeat the promise of ‘not screwing up’ the marriage. Time will tell; as for the deal, it is expected to close in the second half of this year.
First ever acquisition announced by animated gif :) @yahoo is acquiring @tumblr. finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acq…#keepcalmandcarryon
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) May 20, 2013
As for Karp’s blog post on the matter, you can find it here. Don’t read it if you’re uncomfortable with the F-word. That would be ‘fuck’ by the way.
Meanwhile, Yahoo moved its corporate blog over to Tumblr. A great sign.
That’s the gist of the news, folks, although here are some interesting stats and figures from the press release while you make up your mind whether this is a brilliant or idiotic move, or somewhere in between.
With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month.
On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day. Its tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.
The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! is expected to grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent.
The deal offers unique opportunities for both companies. Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.
In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.
The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.
Top Image Credit: Yahoo! Blog
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