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Reports had been coming out over the past few days about the likely sale of microblogging site Tumblr by Verizon to Automattic, owner of Wordpress. Now, the Guardian reports that the sale price is said to be just under $3 million, well short of the $1.1 billion price that Yahoo (who was subsequently acquired by Verizon) paid for it in 2013.
Tumblr is the second major Yahoo property to be spun-off by Verizon. The photo-sharing site Flickr was unloaded in April 2018 to photo-sharing site SmugMug. Unlike Flickr, Tumblr managed to maintain the bulk of its userbase through most of the years of its Yahoo ownership, thanks to the strength of its home-grown community, which survived in the face of competition from Facebook and Twitter.
That community took a hit in December 2018, however, when Verizon announced a plan to clean up the site by banning all adult content. The immediate cause of the decision was a temporary ban from Apple's App Store for the Tumblr app, after child pornography was discovered on the social network. But Tumblr's chief executive, D'Onofrio, said that in the longer term, "it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves".
Tumblr users disagreed, arguing that the site's broadly permissive attitude was key to its unique community.
Rumors are that the sale was conditional upon the site remaining porn-free. On that basis, is $3m too much for it?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @05:08AM
I worked at VZ a few years ago because of an acquisition.
The major VP's all swung by. One put it bluntly. "We leave you alone for about a year. Then we integrate you. Then if you do not perform a year later we sell you off or close you". Guess where tumbler fell in that order. What you say makes sense. It happened about at the one year mark when they would basically show up and say 'you are verizion now deal with it'. They even had a slogan for it "we are verizion". I am sure they started digging and had a 'OMG' moment and 'fixed it'.
The acquisition I was part of had a material impact on the bottom line (which is no small trick with a company that big). They *STILL* cut half the staff. Just imagine what they will do to companies that do not make much money... Expect to see more of former yahoo to be spun out or just flat out shut down (no buyers). All they wanted out of that was the ad network, same reason they bought AOL. Everything else was extra and a distraction and probably not making much or at least not enough to be worth verizons time.
Oh they will say what they are about. Its not that. Its about one thing, $.