Yahoo Agrees $1.1bn For Tumblr – Reports

Yahoo has agreed a deal to buy blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion (£725 million) according to US  news sites. With 100 million useres, Tumblr could bolster Yahoo’s fightback as a major online presence.

The deal will be the largest put through by CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company from Google in July 2012, if confirmed and approved by regulators. It was unanimously agreed by the Yahoo board, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and tech news site AllThingsD.

Yahoo takes a Tumblr?

All sources say the Tumblr brand would be kept on, as would the site’s founder, 26-year old New Yorker David Karp, who started it in 2007.   When it last raised money from investors, Tumblr was valued at $800 million.

The purchase is seen as a good fit, since Tumblr has a large audience of young people but no revenue to speak of, only finally starting to run adverts last year. Meanwhile, Yahoo is cash rich, and has some 700 million regular users, but is seen as old and tired, and needing young users to build its competition against Google and Facebook.

Tumblr has also been successful on mobile devices, something which Yahoo has so far found difficult to pull off.

Yahoo has been acquisitive recently, looking for mobile content and youth-oriented firms, including its purchase of news aggregator Summly, and its attempt to buy French video site Dailymotion, which has been blocked by the French authorities.

Tumblr would be a bigger purchase than anything Mayer has laid hands on so far while at Yahoo, ranking with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Google is also buying plenty of firms, with WhatsApp recently rumoured to be on its shopping list.

Neither Yahoo nor Tumblr have responded yet to requests for comment.

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