Earlier today around 8am Yahoo’s CEO, Melissa Mayer announced that Yahoo has acquired Tumblr. The deal is for approximately 1.1 billion dollars. Interestingly, Yahoo plans to allow Tumblr to continue to operate as its own entity with its own current CEO. Tumblr will be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s personalization technology and search engine structure.
The deal is expected to help increase Yahoo’s traffic by 20%. My speculation is that Yahoo has purchased Tumblr in order to add a social/blogging infrastructure to their search results in order to continue to compete with Google and Bing. Since Bing integrates Facebook into searches and Google uses their own social media Google+, Yahoo desperately needs an additional product integration into their search engine to create a more unique and social experience for users.
By Jeffrey Pucko