At eight o'clock this morning -- Eastern time, before most of its West Coast-centric workforce even woke up -- Yahoo announced it is going to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. There was a press release, and company CEO Marissa Mayer posted a GIF on her personal tumblr page. "We promise not to screw it up," Mayer wrote. "Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going."
It was a charming post, but many across the Internet have pointed out that the 'keep calm and carry on' meme she used is a little old, and that topping the announcement with it is further proof that Yahoo is impossibly behind the times. We'll see.
Tumblr is one of the most buzzed about sites on the Web and, more importantly, in the mobile space. Mobile is an area that Yahoo, along with everyone else in tech, has identified as essential to its success. According to Tumblr, fully half of its users Tumbl from mobile devices. The service sees 300 million unique visitors a month, which should boost Yahoo's own numbers to more than a billion. Those are pretty impressive numbers.
Beyond the impressive numbers, the acquisition casts a cooler light on Yahoo, which is striving hard to shed its "stodgy second-place Internet thing used mostly by Europeans" image. Money does talk -- especially a billion dollars worth -- but in this case it's the follow-up that's most important. To both make money off of Tumblr while not infecting it with the company's anodyne reputation will be a huge challenge. Here's hoping Yahoo actually doesn't screw it up.
