Yahoo buys Tumblr. One billion dollars! Users furious and in rage online.

Many people are asking the question, what is Tumblr and why did Yahoo buy it for a billion dollars?
Tumblr is a unique place where people feel a part of a community, it is really a micro-blogging set up.
Here is what their own site says they are:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything.
Post text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, e-mail or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML.

Tumblr is like a blogging, social media group set up. It is unique in that it is a gathering and sharing place for people.
When I say mircroblogging, that is where you share shorter articles, and more of a thought streaming set up like twitter vs. WordPress, which has blossomed into a full website platform and can be used for anything now and most businesses I know are switching over to it for ease of updates and use and how search engine friendly it is. Now with Tumblr being sold to Yahoo, the core users are worried, and historically if you look at many big companies buying up the smaller ones, they have good reason.  Also Yahoo does not have a good track record with companies it has bought.

Here are some facts about Tumblr.

How big is Tumblr?

Tumblr currently claims 108.4 million blogs with 50.9 billion posts/items posted.

Who is this guy David Karp, who is only 26 and now a billionaire?

Tumblr founder David Karp was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.

If you are a regular reader of this website, or know me, you know I am all about WordPress.

So what is the difference between WordPress and Tumblr?

Tunblr is a micro blogging environment for simple, quick blogging with support for posts, images, quotes, video, audio and links – all you need to get your message out as quick as possible. A simple interface for super fast blogging more like the old style journal type postings.  Quick and simple, with lots of short content and images. It is really more of a social media type interface, with tons of photos, cartoons and animated gifs that are shared with paragraphs of thoughts and feelings. People feel part of a community there. You have fanzine type sections and  basically you name it and you will find it. Once you join you just do a search for topics you are interested in and you start communicating. It is unique. It is nothing like WordPress. The whole interface is more of a social media connecting with other people set up. They host you and you are more of a participant rather then building your own fully functioning website. Though some people do run stores on tumblr, and use it for their website.  I personally found it hard to navigate and I could not find one place where I could see a list of sites I would to check out. I did find tons of fantasy type or gamer sites though. That seemed to be the majority of what I could find. When I tried to look for business tumblr sites or things like that I got lots of tiny 3 or 4 posts that were really spammy, like you get on your websites. Someone obviously told scammers and MLM pyramid people to put something up on tumblr. tumblr is very obviously not designed to run a business site on. One guy had comments from the gamers after all his “business” related lecturing posts, saying stuff like “who tries to run a business on tumblr?” I think if you check out tumblr, you will quickly see what it is for and what it is not for. I found a good article that really details who uses tumblr and if it would be right for you.  The Pros and Cons Of Tumblr For Small Business

WordPress is a full on content management system that you self host, and own 100%. One of the really great things about WordPress is you self host your site, you own it completely.
No one is selling WordPress the company because WordPress is an open source product, which means many people maintain it, and it is a like a group sourced system.  No one can change what you do, no one can yank the rug out from under you. For me having watched so many companies and ideas online come and go, this is a huge reason alone to own a self hosted WordPress website.

Here is a more technical explanation.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, powering over 100 million websites worldwide.

So back to tumblr and this billion dollar buy out.

The tumblr community is in a tizzy about this acquisition,  by Yahoo, and who can blame them? With this sale of the company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion who knows what will happen to the tumblr website now?
Yahoo is the most spammy, hackable, ad filled, tacky sites around. How many of you get spam email from your friends yahoo accounts who are hacked on a regular basis?
I am amazed at how much spam I get from yahoo hacked accounts and it totally sucks because I am really careful with my business email and so many of my contacts have used a yahoo account and been hacked. The spam goes on for years. If you go to any of the Yahoo dead or dying sections, there are ads and it is just all so ugly too.

Part of what made tumblr so enjoyable was the clean ad free interface. Well when a company pays $1.1 billion.for another company, they are not going to leave off ads, especially not Yahoo. Marrisa is saying they will create tasteful ads that blend with the site… now remember she comes from Google, so she knows how to do ads, but Google adsense is not known for their blending tasteful adsense layouts either. An ad is an ad, period. They tend to be ugly and trying to get your attention. I will be interested to see how this all plays out.

The deal could backfire though if Yahoo’s effort to make more money alienate a Tumblr user base that so far has been subjected to hardly any advertising during the service’s six-year history.

“Yahoo has to manage this acquisition in a way that keeps Tumblr’s user base while trying to add advertising, which historically tends to turn off a lot of people,” said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.

To see what the online tumblr community is saying , click here: Meltdown Yahoo buying Tumblr.
Should Tumblr of sold to Yahoo?

I have been online since 1998, and I have watched many, many sites come and go leaving their users stranding and in distress. Here is my list for the graveyard of closed and failed social media, blogging, interactive sites in the last 10 years. Often times when these companies get sold and eaten up by the big guys, they die a quick death later. Let’s take a look.

Click Here to see the Graveyard of online social media communities and products related to interactive communities that are dead now.

What do you think? Is Yahoo going to ruin tumblr? Is Yahoo buying Tumblr going to be a good thing or the end of Tumblr as you know it?

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