So, the news is official now. After tons of rumors about the acquisition of Tumblr, it has finally happened. Tumblr has finally been acquired by Yahoo! In this $1.1 billion cash acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo, WordPress seems to have benefitted. The co-founder of WordPress announced that following reports of the acquisition of Tumblr, more than 72,000 blog posts have been imported to WordPress.com in just an hour. This probably goes to show that users are not confident that Tumblr will continue to remain cool after the acquisition.
Yahoo will more than clearly face a problem of keeping the acquired Tumblr cool enough for the younger demographics. When Tumblr was introduced, it was successful and regarded cool enough to steal users from Twitter, Facebook and other types of social networking sites. One major concern that young users have is that Tumblr, post-acquisition will be largely controlled by Yahoo’s way of doing things. This means that Yahoo may not allow adult content to feature on its blogs However, Yahoo has made its stand that Tumblr will continue to be presented in its regular entity.
Tumblr had been cool from start to end. Starting with its interface and company culture and then ending with the users of Tumblr, everything about it is cool. It is said that people who use Tumblr stay on the site longer than Facebook users. This is why it is expected that Tumblr will lose the cool factor with this acquisition. After all, Yahoo has the reputation of being un-cool. For instance, using Yahoo for email is passé. Gmail is the in-thing. Who watches videos on Yahoo? Instead, they watch them on YouTube. This reputation of being un-cool serves as a challenge for a company like Tumblr, which is known for doing cool stuff. Quite naturally, buying over Tumblr will not make Yahoo a cool brand overnight. If Yahoo does not put in efforts to do things correctly with Tumblr, the company runs the risk of harming the image that Tumblr has been able to build up. The credibility and cool image created by Tumblr over the years are at stake and currently in Yahoo’s hands. Yahoo’s approach to this will affect the future of Tumblr’s popularity. If Yahoo mismanages the site, then Tumblr will become just another ad platform and the user base will dwindle.
Successful Tumblr acquisition would mean that it is left as its own entity. So, if this is done, then Tumblr will continue to retain its cool factor. This is exactly what Amazon did with Zappos. Until date, Amazon’s strategy seems highly effective with business growth. So, only time will tell how Tumblr is perceived in the near future.