Tumblr is a good example of an 'uncontrolled platform'. What started as a beautiful blogging platform, has now turned into a junkyard of cat memes, 'blurr-photo-in-the-background' quotes and animated GIF thumbnails of movie snapshots and softcore pornography. Of course your feed depends on what/who you subscribe to..but due to the nature of Tumblr's platform, even the best blogs sometimes reblog either of the junk above, which makes the platform very painful to use. Sometimes, it takes upto 5 whole minutes to load the entire dashboard. Also tumblr has a terrible UX implementation site-wide (Example - if you want to enable the ability of your followers to answer your post, it's title should end with a question mark, after which a tiny checkbox will pop-up from no-where which you can then click to enable answers.)
In my opinion, $1.1 Billion is a really good deal for a trashcan full of 99% animated cat GIFs and 1% decent content. Rejecting it could be a bad idea as far as I know. Yes Instagram was over-valued, but hey, atleast it didn't come with animated cat GIF's.
Actually, Instagram turned out to be a fantastic deal. Many thought it was over-valued at the time but Instagram has passed 100 million active users early this year and users spend more time on Instagram than they do on Twitter (or practically any other app than Facebook or email). In retrospect, I think $1 Billion was a steal.
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Here's my perspective as a hardcore tumblr user -
Tumblr is a good example of an 'uncontrolled platform'. What started as a beautiful blogging platform, has now turned into a junkyard of cat memes, 'blurr-photo-in-the-background' quotes and animated GIF thumbnails of movie snapshots and softcore pornography. Of course your feed depends on what/who you subscribe to..but due to the nature of Tumblr's platform, even the best blogs sometimes reblog either of the junk above, which makes the platform very painful to use. Sometimes, it takes upto 5 whole minutes to load the entire dashboard. Also tumblr has a terrible UX implementation site-wide (Example - if you want to enable the ability of your followers to answer your post, it's title should end with a question mark, after which a tiny checkbox will pop-up from no-where which you can then click to enable answers.)
In my opinion, $1.1 Billion is a really good deal for a trashcan full of 99% animated cat GIFs and 1% decent content. Rejecting it could be a bad idea as far as I know. Yes Instagram was over-valued, but hey, atleast it didn't come with animated cat GIF's.
I have to agree. If Yahoo is offering this much, they need to take it, because I don't believe Tumblr will ever be successfully monetized.
Instagram had 500m in cash and Tumblr is running out of the money. So this is the good exit for Tumblr
Hey, it's for the millions (I presume) of "Yahoo!News" readers out there, so I'd say "product-market fit": achievement-unlocked.
Actually, Instagram turned out to be a fantastic deal. Many thought it was over-valued at the time but Instagram has passed 100 million active users early this year and users spend more time on Instagram than they do on Twitter (or practically any other app than Facebook or email). In retrospect, I think $1 Billion was a steal.
They could have a billion active users and would still have $0 in revenue. I don't see how it's a steal.
$1.1 Billion is a really good deal for a trashcan full of 99% animated cat GIFs and 1% decent content.
Have you read Yahoo news lately? It's dumbed-down sensationalistic garbage that makes Tumblr look absolutely brilliant in comparison.
Don't the generally just get news from Reuters and AP?