• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

BG Mahesh | mahesh.com

Internet in India

  • Home
  • Indian-Languages
  • Karnataka.com
  • Links
  • Gallery
  • About Mahesh
  • Contact Me
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Articles you must read about Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr

BG Mahesh · May 21, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday Yahoo announced the acquisition of New York-based blogging platform Tumblr, a microblogging platform and social networking website. These days deals don’t come cheap – Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, all-cash deal. Sweet! The Founder & CEO David Karp is just 26 years old.

Other famous billion dollar acquisitions – Facebook’s $1 billion for Instagram in 2012  and Microsoft’s $1.2 billion for Yammer.
Yahoo Tumblr Acquisition

Tumblr offers tools to make simple blog pages, which anyone with a Web browser can see without signing up with Tumblr. However, you need to login to subscribe to different Tumblogs, which they view on a “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s newsfeeds.

Tumblr could be one of the few startups from New York area that has made it this big. My first serious read about Tumblr (as a company) was in Forbes India magazine.

The most famous personality on Tumblr from India is surely the megastar Amitabh Bachchan. Earlier his blog was hosted on WordPress (Reliance site bigadda.com).

  • Tumblr started in 2007.
  • David Karp is a college drop out.
  • Karp’s education in the digital world began at the age of 11, by teaching himself how to code from ‘HTML for Dummies’
  • Karp will make $250 million from this deal. Plans to use the money for philanthropy and for college (but does he need a degree anymore?)

Tumblr Revenues

  • The company burned through an estimated $25 million in 2012 and made only $13 million in revenue.
  • It set a $100 million revenue target for 2013 but pulled in only $13 million last quarter (Jan-Mar 2013).
  • Tumblr is a much more anonymous platform than some of its social networking peers and lacks the  demographic information found on Facebook and Instagram

Tumblr Stats

  • As of May 19, 2013, Tumblr hosts over 108.2 million blogs and more than 50.8 billion posts in total.
  • In April 2013 the website received more than 13 billion global page views.
  • As of May 2013, 75.8 million posts were created on the site each day.
  • 500 million page views a day
  • 15B+ page views month
  • ~20 engineers
  • The peak rate of ~40k requests per second
  • 1+ TB/day into Hadoop cluster
  • Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache
  • Growing at 30% a month
  • ~1000 hardware nodes in production
  • Billions of page visits per month per engineer
  • Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7 TB a day.
  • Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing

Tumblr Funding

  • In its first round of funding in October 2007, Tumblr raised $750,000 from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.
  • In December 2008, the company raised $4.5 million in Series B funding and a further $5 million in April 2010.
  • In December 2010, Tumblr raised $30 million in Series D funding.
  • The company had an $800 million valuation in August 2011.
  • In September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners.
  • In May 2013 it was acquired for $1.1 billion cash.

Less Is More – or is it?

While designing user interfaces we are told to follow the principle “Less is more”.

It is not uncommon for the acquired company to shut after the acquisition, which happens mainly due to interference from the acquirer company management (or they discover a lot of dirt in the acquisition later). However, Yahoo CEO has assured they won’t screw with Tumblr. But her tweet says something more or “less”?

Yahoo CEO tweet after Tumblr acquisition

Few interesting articles to read about the acquisition,

  • Why Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for $1 billion makes a certain horrible kind of sense
  • Buying Pinterest would have made more sense for Yahoo
  • The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars – must-read for techies
  • Can Yahoo Ignore Tumblr’s Dark Side?
  • If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn? Simple answer, it will keep it! There is a good reason for that.
  • Why Yahoo Doesn’t Think Tumblr Has a Porn Problem
  • How Many Users Does Tumblr Really Have?
  • Yahoo! And Tumblr It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale
  • Yahoo Is Going to Run More Ads on Tumblr
  • Tumblr Founder Says Site Will Stay an ‘Independent’ Effort
  • Post-acquisition about 600 Tumblr users are moving to WordPress
  • Marissa Mayer: Some Tumblr users “may never come to Yahoo,” and that’s OK
  • David Karp’s Multimillion-Dollar Plans for Tumblr – March 2013
  • Forbes.com: 30 Under 30 (David Karp)
  • Tumblr Founder David Karp Has Mixed Feelings About Dropping Out Of High School
  • The Fabulous Life Of David Karp, 26-Year-Old Founder Of The $1 Billion Tumblr Empire

Related

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: acquisition, amitabh bachchan, yahoo

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Connect

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Top Posts

  • Digital India: A list of popular government websites in India
    Digital India: A list of popular government websites in India
  • False Narrative is more dangerous than Fake News
    False Narrative is more dangerous than Fake News
  • Indian Language Digital Tools, Portals & Mobile Apps
    Indian Language Digital Tools, Portals & Mobile Apps
  • Popular Podcasts in India
    Popular Podcasts in India
  • Contact Me
    Contact Me

Recent Posts

  • Digital Media needs an Online Dispute Resolution system
  • Digital Ad spend in India to grow 28% in 2021
  • A Self Regulatory Organization Needed For Digital Media in India
  • 1995-2020: 25 years of internet in India
  • Sahamati turns one!

Categories

  • Government
  • Internet Portals
  • Mobile
  • Online Advertising
  • Internet
  • Media
  • Social Media
  • Broadband
  • Indian Languages
  • etc

Tags

3g acquisition bangalore books Broadband broadband penetration browsers comscore dailyhunt digital advertising in india digital india domain name Ecommerce election campaign election digital campaign elections facebook google iamai imrb india online advertising indic indic fonts internet penetration kannada market size mobile advertising mobile apps mobile internet mobile marketing mobile penetration my column mysore nielsen oneindia online advertising forecast Print Media sjce smartphones tier-2 tv advertising twitter vijay next whatsapp yahoo

Copyright © 2022 · Mahesh.com

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT