Yahoo Is Planning to Buy Tumblr for $1.1 Billion
May 20, 2013
The board of Yahoo, the faded Web pioneer, agreed on Sunday to buy the popular blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, a signal of how the company plans to reposition itself as the technology industry makes a headlong rush into social media.
The deal, which is expected
to be announced as soon as Monday, would be the biggest acquisition of a
social networking company since Facebook paid $1 billion last year for
Instagram, the photo-sharing site.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the new chief of Yahoo.
For Yahoo and its chief
executive, Marissa Mayer, buying Tumblr would be a bold move as Ms.
Mayer tries to breathe new life into the company. The deal, the seventh
since Ms. Mayer defected from Google last summer to take over the
company, would be her biggest yet. It is meant to give her company more
appeal to young people, and to make up for years of missing out on the
revolutions in social networking and mobile devices. Tumblr has over 108
million blogs, with many highly active users.
Yet even with all those users, a basic question about Tumblr and other social media sites remains open: Can they make money?
Founded six years ago,
Tumblr has attracted a loyal following and raised millions from big-name
investors. Still, it has not proved that it can be profitable, nor that
it can succeed on mobile devices, which are becoming the gateway to the
Internet. Even Facebook faces continued pressure from investors to show
it can increase its profits and adapt to the mobile world.
“The challenge has always
been, how do you monetize eyeballs?” said Charlene Li, the founder of
the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm. “Services like Instagram and
Facebook always focus on the user experience first. Once that loyalty is
there, they figure out how to carefully, ideally, make money on it.”
A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment. A representative for Tumblr did not respond to requests for comment.
If the deal is approved,
Ms. Mayer will face the challenge of successfully managing the takeover,
given Yahoo’s notorious reputation for paying big money for start-ups
and then letting the prizes wither. Previous acquisitions by Yahoo, like
the purchase of Flickr for $35 million and a $3.6 billion deal for
GeoCities, an early pioneer in social networking, have been either shut
down or neglected within the company.
Because of this, Ms. Mayer
will face pressure to keep Tumblr’s staff, led by its founder, the
26-year-old David Karp, who dropped out of high school as a 15-year-old
programmer. It is unclear whether all of Tumblr’s 175 employees, based
in New York City, will move over to Yahoo.
At the same time, analysts
and investors are likely to question whether buying a site that has
struggled to generate revenue makes sense.
“This is not an inexpensive
acquisition, but they’re willing to pay to get back some of what
they’ve lost,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “They want
to be hip.”
In her short tenure as chief executive, Ms. Mayer has bought
a string of tiny start-ups. Most of those were aimed at buying
engineering talent that could help freshen Yahoo’s core products, like
mail, finance and sports, as well as build out new mobile services.
Ms. Mayer has had ambitions
to hunt bigger game, armed with $4.3 billion in cash from selling half
of Yahoo’s stake in the Chinese Internet titan Alibaba.
She has had conversations
with a number of other big-ticket targets, like Foursquare, a mobile app
that lets users find nearby restaurants, stores and bars, and Hulu, the
video streaming service, according to people with knowledge of those
discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Tumblr brings something
that Ms. Mayer has sought for some time: a full-fledged social network
with a loyal following. The start-up claims more than 100 million blogs
on its site, reaching 44 million people in the United States and 134
million around the world, according to Quantcast.
But in some ways, Yahoo
isn’t pursuing users — it already claims 700 million, one of the biggest
user bases on the Web — but products and services that would again make
it a central destination. Once the biggest seller of display ads in the
United States, Yahoo has lost market share to the likes of Google and
Facebook. Its share of all digital ad revenue tumbled to 8.4 percent
last year, from 15.5 percent in 2009, even as total advertising spending
grew, according to eMarketer. Google now claims about 41 percent.
The company also missed the
shift from the Web to smartphones and tablets. It waited a
significantly long time to roll out apps for its most popular services,
missing out on chances to harvest users to competitors like Google and
Apple.
And while Yahoo has managed
to grow internationally, it has struggled to make its familiar brand
relevant again. Until a recent home page renovation, the company’s main
page felt claustrophobic, with ads and content jumbled together.
Tumblr’s trove of users and
pages could provide fertile new ground for Yahoo’s ad operations, with
what industry experts say is a bounty of unsold ad inventory. Mr. Karp
of Tumblr had eschewed advertising, favoring a minimalist policy,
starting to serve users ads only last May.
Mr. Karp, the C.E.O., is
expected to get nearly $250 million from the deal. Spark Capital, a
venture firm in Boston, has been involved in five investment rounds of
Tumblr’s financing and is expected to make tens of millions of dollars
from the deal.
Yet it is not clear how
much Tumblr can help Yahoo reach its goals. The blogging site burned
through an estimated $25 million in cash last year, and struggled to
raise additional money at an acceptable valuation, according to people
briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about
it. That prompted Mr. Karp to begin deal discussions with a number of
companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google, though nothing came
of those talks.
Yahoo and Tumblr have been
in serious talks since last week, culminating in the Yahoo board’s vote
to approve the deal on Sunday morning.
The blogging site has been
trying to create new ad efforts like interactive campaigns, rather than
using standard clickable ads, with mixed success. It has set a revenue
goal of $100 million for this year; the company reported only $13
million for the first quarter and reported $13 million for 2012.
Despite its ranking as the
24th most viewed Web site on the Internet, according to Quantcast,
Tumblr has yet to translate that into success on mobile devices,
something Yahoo strongly wants.
Tumblr also bears a fair
amount of unsavory content that may unsettle advertisers. Pornography
represents a fraction of content on the site, but not a trivial amount
for a site with 100 million blogs.
The search for profits
isn’t unique to Tumblr, as free apps and services struggle to wring
money from their users. Instagram famously generated no money when
Facebook bought it.
Mr. Gillis of BGC said,
“Either this management team is going to turn Yahoo around or be the
ones who squandered its asset base.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jenna Wortham contributed reporting.雅虎同意11億美元收購Tumblr
2013年05月20日
對內情有直接了解的人士稱，沒落的網絡先驅雅虎(Yahoo)公司董事會在周日同意以11億美元（約合67.64億元人民幣）現金收購熱門的博客服務網站Tumblr，眼下正值科技行業不顧一切地進軍社交媒體領域，此舉顯示出雅虎正在尋求改變自身定位。
這筆交易將成為自去年Facebook以10億美元收購照片分享網站Instagram之後的最大一筆社交媒體公司併購交易。該交易最早有望在周一對外宣布。
- 檢視大圖
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News谷歌前高管瑪麗莎‧梅耶爾將擔任雅虎新任總裁。
收購Tumblr對雅虎及其首席執行官瑪麗莎·梅耶爾
(Marissa
Mayer)來說是一個大膽的舉措，梅耶爾正在努力給公司注入新鮮活力。自她去年夏天離開谷歌(Google)開始掌管雅虎之後，這已經是公司的第七筆交
易，也將是最大的一筆。它意在讓雅虎對年輕人更有吸引力，也希望彌補該公司幾年來在社交網絡和移動設備革命中錯過的機會。Tumblr擁有超過1.08億
個博客，很多用戶十分活躍。
但是，即便擁有所有這些用戶，對Tumblr和其他社交媒體網站來說有一個基本的問題始終懸而未決：它們能賺錢嗎？
Tumblr創立六年來已經吸引了一批忠實用戶，也從一些
著名投資者那裡募得數以百萬計的投資。但是，它還沒能證明它能夠盈利，或者在移動設備上取得成功，後者正在成為互聯網接入的主要工具。即便是
Facebook，也不斷面臨著來自投資者的壓力，要它證明能增加利潤並適應移動世界。
諮詢公司奧特米特集團(Altimeter
Group)的創始人莎琳·李(Charlene
Li)稱：「問題一直都在於，如何將吸引力變現？像Instagram和Facebook等公司提供的服務總會首先關注用戶體驗。從理論上來說，一旦有了
忠誠度，就會想辦法如何謹慎地以此來賺錢。」
雅虎公司一名女發言人拒絕對此發表評論。Tumblr公司的一名代表也沒有回應評論請求。
雅虎公司常會花大價錢購下創業公司，之後又讓這些錢打水
漂，鑒於它的這種名聲，一旦這筆交易獲准，梅耶爾面臨的挑戰是要成功地接管公司。雅虎之前收購的公司，無論是3500萬美元買回的Flickr還是36億
美元買到的社交網絡早期試水者GeoCities，它們的結局不是關閉就是被公司擱置一旁。
因此，梅耶爾將面臨著要留住Tumblr員工的壓力，這些員工的領袖是15歲從高中輟學成為程序員、現年26歲的創始人戴維·卡普(David Karp)。還不能確定Tumblr在紐約的所有175名員工是否會全部轉移到雅虎公司。
與此同時，分析人士和投資者很可能會質疑，收購一個自己都無法盈利的網站是否合理。
BGC公司(BGC Partners)分析師科林·吉利斯(Colin Gillis)表示：「這次收購代價不菲，但他們願意花錢來彌補一些失去的東西。他們想跟上潮流。」
在梅耶爾擔任首席執行官不長的時間內，她已經收購了一系列小型創業公司。大部分收購都是為了獲取工程方面的優勢，以便更新雅虎的核心產品，比如電子郵件、財經和體育，並開發出新的移動服務。
雅虎出售它所持有的中國互聯網巨頭阿里巴巴的一半股份獲得了43億美元，憑着這筆資金，梅耶爾曾有雄心獵獲更大的公司。
未獲得授權公開談論這些商談的知情人士透露，她已經與很多開價很高的收購對象進行過商談，比如，可以讓用戶在附近找到餐館、商店和酒吧的移動應用公司Foursquare，以及視頻流網站Hulu。
Tumblr所帶來的正是梅耶爾一段時期以來所尋找的：一個擁有一批忠實擁護者的成熟的社交網絡。Quantcast的數據顯示，這家創業公司的網站上有超過1億個博客，在美國覆蓋用戶數為4400萬，在全世界1.34億。
但是從某種方面來說，雅虎追求的不是用戶，它已經擁有7億
用戶，是網絡世界最大的用戶基數之一，它追求的是能讓它再度成為核心站點的產品和服務。雅虎曾是美國展示廣告最大的賣家，但如今已由谷歌和
Facebook這樣的公司搶佔了它的部分市場份額。EMarketer的研究顯示，在去年廣告總體投入增加的情況下，它在整個數字廣告市場的份額從
2009年的15.5%跌到了8.4%。谷歌現在的份額是41%。
雅虎還錯過了從網絡向智能手機和平板電腦轉換的時機。它等了很長時間才為它最熱門的服務推出應用，錯失了贏取用戶的機會，把機會留給了像谷歌、蘋果這樣的競爭對手。
雖然雅虎做到了在國際市場的增長，它卻無法讓人們再度關注它的品牌。在最近一次主頁全面改版之前，雅虎的主頁讓人感到幽閉恐怖，廣告和頁面內容凌亂地排列在一起。
Tumblr的用戶庫及大量頁面可以為雅虎的廣告運營提供一片新的沃土，行業專家們說這意味着大量的待售廣告位。Tumblr的卡普一直避開廣告，傾向於極簡主義策略，從去年5月才開始為用戶提供廣告。
卡普是Tumblr的首席執行官，預計會從這一收購交易中得到將近2.5億美元。位於波士頓的風險投資公司星火資本(Spark Capital)曾參與了Tumblr的五輪融資，預計將從這筆交易中獲得數千萬美元。
然而，Tumblr能從多大程度上幫助雅虎實現它的目標尚
不明確。據熟知此事但未被授權公開談論它的人說，這家博客網站去年燒掉了約2500萬美元，也無法以可接受的估價募集更多資金。這促使卡普開始與數家公司
討論交易問題，包括Facebook、微軟、谷歌，但這些商談都沒有任何結果。
雅虎和Tumblr從上周開始進行正式商談，周日早上達到高潮，雅虎的董事會投票同意這項交易。
這家博客網站一直在努力創造互動營銷這樣的新型廣告計劃，而不是採取標準的可點擊式廣告，這方面的成果成敗參半。它今年定下了1億美元收入的目標，但是第一季度收入僅1300萬美元，並且2012年全年的收入僅為1300萬美元。
Quantcast的數據顯示，儘管Tumblr是網絡上瀏覽量居第24位的網站，它還未能將它的成功轉化到移動設備上，而後者卻是雅虎極其想要得到的。
Tumblr還有不少不雅的內容可能會讓廣告客戶不安。色情內容只佔網站上的一部分，但對於一個有1億博客的網站來說，這些量不算少。
謀求盈利並非Tumblr獨有的問題，許多免費應用和服務都努力從它們的用戶身上賺錢。眾所周知，Instagram被Facebook收購時就是不賺錢的。
BGC的吉利斯說：「雅虎要麼在這個管理團隊手中起死回生，要麼被它揮霍掉所有的資產。」
Andrew Ross Sorkin和Jenna Wortham對本文有報道貢獻。翻譯：曹莉、張亮亮
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Social Networking
Report: Yahoo! Board Approves Billion-Dollar Tumblr Deal
| The Yahoo! board has unanimously approved a deal to purchase social blogging platform Tumblr |
The Tragic Beauty of Google+
And I’m not sure if it’s ever built anything more beautiful than the new version of its Google+ social network which debuted on Wednesday during the Google I/O keynote.
The service, which was already pretty darn slick, is now among the most attractive and engaging web apps I’ve ever seen. Streams of activity are now laid out as one, two or three columns of tiles, depending on available screen real estate, with some oversized photos spanning the whole width. (Judging from my stream, some Google+ aficionados like the old format better — they can switch back to one column — but I find the new one less claustrophobic.) The left-hand toolbar which used to hog space now disappears until you need it; throughout, the level of visual polish is high, with pixel-perfect design and subtle little animations as you click on different controls.
Google+ can now auto-hashtag your items, a feature which is useful because you can click on any hashtag and then flip through related items shared by other people, without leaving the page you’re on. When it figures out a hashtag based on words in your post, it’s neat. But in some cases, it can also analyze a photo to determine a relevant hashtag, a feat which can be downright dazzling. I uploaded a shot from Disneyland and a drawing of Superman; it correctly identified both and linked appropriately.
The photo features, already practically a service unto themselves, get a thorough makeover. In a feature which reminds me a bit of Everpix, Google+ gives you a page of “highlights” which it chooses algorithmically: shots with family members, shots with smiling people, shots which it just deems to be aesthetically pleasing. There’s an auto-enhancement feature, which would be nice, but no big whoop except that you can tell Google+ to apply it to all your photos without your intervention. And “auto-awesome” features proactively create panoramas, animated-GIF-like loops and other special photos if they notice suitable images in your collection.
Then there’s Hangouts — a new standalone app for Android and iOS that spins off Google+’s Hangouts video-chat feature into its own world, a sort of social-network-within-the-social-network. The Hangouts app does video and text chat and photo sharing, and is designed for both impromptu one-time interactions and ongoing conversations that could go on over a period of days or longer. I can imagine it appealing both to Google+ diehards and people who aren’t otherwise active on the service.
Overall, Google+ doesn’t do anywhere near as many things as Facebook, but the things it does, it does well. Once a me-too service that seemed to exist solely because Facebook posed a potentially existential threat to Google’s dominance of the web, it now has its own style and signature features. Where Facebook is rather stolid – it has its own beautification initiative going on, but feels hamstrung by its need to retain some visual consistency with its past self — Google+ is exuberant. It’s fun to use.
And yet I’m pretty positive I won’t spend remotely as much time in it as I will in Facebook.
You might have already guessed why: My friends, family and acquaintances are all on Facebook, where they add up to a bustling community I enjoy being part of. More than any particular feature that Mark Zuckerberg and company have cooked up, it’s the people in my life that make Facebook, well, Facebook.
Over on Google+, I find some worthwhile material to peruse, but in far smaller quantities. The smattering of people I encounter hardly replicates my real-world social connections. The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting. As a social experience, it often feels perfunctory.
I don’t, by the way, claim that any of that is Google+’s fault. In fact, at least some of it is my fault: I’m kind of an absentee landlord of my Google+ page, dropping in only occasionally and sharing items even more sporadically. You can’t complain about the quality of a community unless you try to be part of it. Also, it’s always dangerous to assume that your experience on a social network is representative — I have friends who favor Google+ over Facebook specifically because they find it more lively and personal.
Still, I don’t feel guilty about favoring the social network that feels more like an extension of my world. That’s Facebook. And since Facebook exists, I don’t have much of an incentive to pour more energy into Google+. The two services aren’t identical in particulars and emphasis — today’s Facebook seems to be built on the philosophy that everyone should share everything at all times, sometimes in an automated fashion, and Google+ isn’t like that at all — but ultimately, they scratch the same itch.
Therein lies Google+’s great challenge. Even if it’s good — even if it’s great — it’s not going to displace Facebook as the world’s primary social network. And most people don’t need a second social network. (Or at least a Facebook-like social network: Twitter, Pinterest and others that don’t take Facebook on directly can and do thrive.)
Mind you, there are worse fates than being the world’s second biggest general-purpose social network. After less than two years since Google+’s debut, Google says, 190 million people are active members. A total of 390 million take advantage of its features across Google, such as video calls in Gmail. Google+ isn’t going anywhere. But it has little mindshare among normal everyday folks, and it’s not clear what Google can do to change that. Unless Facebook implodes — hey, it’s not utterly unthinkable — Google’s service might never be more than what it is now: a beautiful disappointment.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2013/05/16/the-tragic-beauty-of-google/#ixzz2TtOOTIcD
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