Yahoo! agrees to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn
The board of Yahoo! unanimously approved chief executive Marissa Meyer’s plan to buy the six-year-old company as it pursues a younger audience online.
Tumblr is based in New York where it is run by David Karp, who grew up on the Upper West Side. The young tech entrepreneur, who started his website at the age of 20, only attended high school for a year before being taught at home and never went on to college. His father is a film and TV music composer.
Mr Karp’s network hosts more than 100m blogs, enabling users to post short text, pictures and videos, making it a rival to both Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr has attracted $125m in venture funding but last year its revenues were just $13m.
Yahoo!’s all-cash acquisition will form part of Ms Meyer’s attempts to turn around the company after years of decline from its dotcom-era heyday.
It is by far the biggest deal the chief executive has done since leaving Google to take the reins last year. Earlier this month Yahoo! bought Astrid, an American “to do” app with four million users, and the news app Summly - bought in March for £18m from British teenager Nick D’Aloisio. Unlike Tumblr, both were seen mostly as talent, rather than product, acquisitions.
The Telegraph
