It has been rumored all week that Yahoo is going to buy out Tumblr for 1 billion dollars. The blogging site is has grown incredibly popular among young people, but many worry that the site will end up as an ad farm for Yahoo’s main site, ads that bring in billions of dollars a year.
David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, is praised for staying away from traditional online advertising, and fans worry that this could be the end of its anonymous interface. What Tumblr fans most enjoy about the website is the lack of traditional advertising and the need to disclose who they really are in person. Mayer’s aggressive efforts to turn Yahoo into something renewed that users will use more often can either be a good thing or a bad thing for Tumblr.
However Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reassures Tumblr fans that there will be no branding of Yahoo on the acquired domain and that Tumblr is to remain as a separate business operation with Karp in charge. She references how Google’s buyout of YouTube and Ebay’s purchase of PayPal were essentially undetectable by users. She asserts that the way Yahoo plans to monetize Tumbler will be meaningful to the user experience.
Mayer is famous for her first year on the job by redesigning the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo Mail, and Flickr to better increase user satisfaction. Positive commentary on the deal proposes that this will be a great relationship between both sites. Yahoo can benefit from Tumblrs millions of visitors per month, and Tumblr can piggy back on the giant.