Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined Yahoo from Google in July 2012, have had a difficult time making the firm more dynamic in today’s marketplace. However, 2013 acquisition Tumblr may be turning out to be wise strategic move. But its impact on Yahoo’s ad revenues is still in question.
What is Tumblr? According to its Web site: “Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML.” As of now, there have been 833 billion posts across 200 million blogs at Tumblr.
New research from eMarketer sheds light on how rapidly Tumblr is growing and is expected to grow:
“Tumblr continues to gain popularity in the U.S., with the number of users increasing 46.2% in 2013, totaling 13.7 million internet users, according to new figures from eMarketer – our first-ever forecast of Tumblr usage. Usage of the Yahoo-owned social blogging platform will increase by nearly another 25% in 2014, according to our estimates, totaling more than 17.1 million internet users this year. Growth in the number of users who access their Tumblr accounts each month will taper off into the single digits by 2017, when the user base totals 22.8 million users, or 12.0% of all social networkers in the U.S.”
Nonetheless, “questions have hovered around the site’s value to the internet giant, and whether its youthful user base can inject life into Yahoo’s declining display advertising business.”
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