Yahoo! to buy Tumblr, are you still eager?

Earlier today, Tumblr has finally broke the news that they’ve been acquired by Yahoo! The sale was pegged at $1.1PHP 65INR 93EUR 1CNY 8 billion, just a little more than what Facebook got Instagram.

David Karpp, the 26-year old founder and CEO of Tumblr, posted the news on their staff Tumblr account and assured that everything will remain the way they are.

Tumblr started as a short-form blogging platform back in 2007 and grew to become one of the most popular blogging service with over 108 million blogs in the network. The site generated over 13 billion global page views for the month of April 2013.

The service is very popular among the teens and users with age 25 and below.

Tumblr has had its own share of issues as well with site downtimes which prompted a number of popular bloggers to move to more stable platforms. Even the popular local blogs have moved to a self-hosted platform like WordPress (Cammile Co, Googly Gooeys, Divine Lee, etc.) since last year.

The site makes money from advertising. Tumblr made $13PHP 763INR 1,102EUR 12CNY 95 million in revenue in 2012 and is expected to make $100PHP 5,869INR 8,475EUR 95CNY 728 million in 2013. Yahoo! purchase of $1.1PHP 65INR 93EUR 1CNY 8 billion puts the sale price at 11 times annual revenue.

Yahoo’s acquisition have been met with mixed reactions. For one, Yahoo! has been known to buy a lot of really good sites only to shut them down a couple of years later. Some fear that this might also happen to Tumblr too and there could be mass exodus of users to other platforms.

The other issue is with the type of content that Tumblr hosts — most of which are reported to be large porn sites, constituting a huge chunk of Tumblr’s traffic. Then, there’s also the issue of copyright.

Whatever the result of this acquisition, we’re hoping it does not mean the end of Tumblr. The site certainly deserves some much-needed assistance with infrastructure and scale. At the end of the day though, it will still be the call of Tumblr users.

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