Yahoo has been on a startup acquisition spree since Marissa Mayer took charge, with 10 startups sinking into the Yahoo foundation, for the most part these startups served the purpose of technology or talent.
We have yet to see a big acquisition from Mayer, although she has been pondering a few options, including DailyMotion, Hulu and now the well known microblogging website Tumblr.
The foundation of Yahoo has a lot of different media and news outlets and while the company tries to condense these into simple and elegant user experiences, they still want to expand and progress with variety.
DailyMotion was a clear target for Yahoo and they were ready to get a 85% stake, but the French government stopped this deal from happening. This would have been the biggest deal since Mayer took charge, costing a total of $300 million.
Tumblr is quite an odd acquisition target, in business sense the microblogging website does not make a lot of revenue and has a unique embedded community making the website popular and cool.
If Yahoo acquire Tumblr, it may ruin this “cool factor” and Yahoo will obviously want to make a return on the $1 billion investment, so monetizing the website for additional revenue will be needed.
Big acquisitions of smaller companies with large communities can go good or bad, Facebook acquired Instagram, and while users felt the future for the photo sharing giant was tarnished, there have been more users on Instagram and faster deployment to newer platforms since the acquisition.
Yahoo has made a real turnover in the last year in terms of design, if we look at newly designed applications on the web and mobile, they look great and have excellent user experiences.
Marissa Mayer may have brought Yahoo into the new decade of computing, now she needs some solid acquisitions and products to make Yahoo relevant again, Tumblr may be one of those.
