Yahoo board to consider $1.1-bn bid for blogging service Tumblr
18 May 2013
Yahoo's board will meet on Sunday to decide whether to offer $1.1 billion in cash for blogging service Tumblr, AllThingsD yesterday reported, citing sources close to the situation as saying.
The technology blog had early this week reported that Yahoo could have a strategic alliance and invest in or outright buy Tumblr, which has been stepping up its efforts to raise a funding round that could value it at $1 billion.
The potential deal would be CEO Marissa Mayer's largest acquisition since she took charge last year of the once-iconic company.
The report said that Mayer started focusing on Tumblr about six weeks ago and soon found out that the fast-growing content site, was just the kind of asset that Yahoo needed to make it both ''cool'' and relevant to new audiences.
Founded in 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment, Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website, which allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
Tumblr lets a user share and post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from browser, phone, desktop or email.
Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore, while Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts.
Tumblr has raised $125 million from investors that include Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, and Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners.
The potential deal comes a few weeks after the French government torpedoed Yahoo's plans to buy controlling stake in popular online video website Dailymotion, owned by France Telecom, and the 12th-largest video website in the world by unique users.
The deal had been torpedoed by France's controversial industry minister Arnaud Montebourg, who did not want one of the country's most successful start-ups being "devoured" by Americans.
The rejection has now opened the possibility of French mass media company Vivendi buying Dailymotion (See: After Yahoo, Vivendi now offers to buy online video-sharing service Dailymotion).