LIVE: Marissa Mayer Promises “Not to Screw Up” Tumblr Deal for Yahoo!
Updated with full video – see below.
On today’s SiliconANGLE Live NewsDesk Show, (see embed feed below or visit youtube.com/siliconangle to watch on-demand), we discuss the news of Yahoo! acquiring Tumblr. If you were anywhere near the Internet this weekend, you heard the news break of Yahoo!’s board approving the acquisition of Tumblr, reported at $1.1 billion in cash.
Here are the first two sentences direct from Yahoo!’s Tumblr blog post:
“I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! We promise not to screw it up.”
The first 20 words of the official announcement says it all. “We promise not to screw it up.” That, in a nutshell, summarizes the message Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has been pushing since taking the helm of a struggling web giant. Yahoo!’s got a string of failed acquisitions behind it, and it seems the company is unsure what to do with its biggest buys. Mayer will have to execute a plan of action quickly, perhaps even monetizing Tumblr directly in order to change public perception of Yahoo!’s ability to deliver in the era of the industrialized Internet.
Think about it. You just bought something for a reported $1.1 billion in cash, and the first thing you have to say is, ‘Seriously, this time we got it. Promise, we won’t mess up like all of the other times.’ That’s pretty big news inside of news itself. Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs and has 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, but was Yahoo! the right home?
Joining us now to tell us more about the long-tail implications of the Tumblr acquisition for both Yahoo! and Tumblr is SiliconANGLE Founding Editor John “Rizzn’ Hopkins. (See the live broadcast, embed below ~ if you missed today’s live topic, check our YouTube channel for archived clips.)
Some of the things we’ll be discussing with Hopkins include the basic rundown of what Tumblr is, the bankable reasons as to how Tumblr immediately benefit from Yahoo!, the bankable reasons as to how Yahoo! immediately benefits from Tumblr, and the $1.1 billion dollar question: is Tumblr the next Flickr, Delicious or Geocities, destined to die (or in Flickr’s case nearly die) under Yahoo! control?
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