Well, that’s what you call a shopping trip! Yahoo! has confirmed that it has bought social networking and blogging website Tumblr for a whopping $1.1 Billion… that £724 million in UK terms (and some change!) which by most people’s imagination is a hefty sum of money.
Reportedly Yahoo! has secured the purchase with a $1.1 billion cash deal, according to The Wall Street Journal that is, that see’s the once internet pioneer buy one of the biggest growing sites online.
We are expecting an official announcement today from Yahoo! at its New York City press event, where CEO Marissa Mayer is expected to alert the world to its latest purchase.
On Friday rumours were circulating that the Yahoo! was in negotiations to buy Tumblr for $1 billion and it appears now that Tumblr squeezed an extra 100 million out of the deal!
Now, the real question is… How does the struggling Yahoo! sill have $1.1 Billion to spend?
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Reports are coming in that Yahoo! is in serious talks with Tumblr to purchase the blogging website for a tidy sum of $1 Billion
The news is coming in from AllThingsD, who reports that Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer has been in talks with Tumblr in a bid to turn things around for Yahoo and to raise its “cool factor”.
Talks are apparently in the very early stages between Yahoo! and Tumblr but with the social blogging platform looking to continue its rise we can see just why Yahoo would be interested buying the site.
Tumblr itself is both user and corporate friendly and allows a large platform for sharing content via blogs which individuals or companies can create, customise and curate to suit a particular audience.
It appears that Yahoo! is spending the big money at the moment to re-assert itself back into the internet biz after years of falling stock, but the real question is; what would Tumblr bring to Yahoo!?
Well, purchasing Tumblr would be a quick and easy way for the company to enter into the social media area of the internet without any of the difficult start-up and audience build issues (see Google+) that often cause problems. Plus, Tumblr is a very now website, so Yahoo! could up their coolness with this purchase alone.
Yahoo! has recently had reported talks with other large websites including Daily Motion, Pinterest and Zynga as a part of its new spending spree but currently there have been no material results from any of these. The company did however purchase Summly for $30 million, a news app for iPhone that was developer by a teenager in the UK.
There is a long way until a deal is set so it’s very much just a rumour right now, but with Yahoo! being on a spending spree at the moment, what’s another $1 Billion to spend?