Tumblr To Be Purchased By Yahoo! For a Cool Billion?

Earlier this week at a tech conference Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman noted that one of the challenges his aging company faces is making itself “cool again.”

And what site are all the cool kids on nowadays? (Besides this one, I mean.)

Yep. Yahoo! might buy Tumblr.

It’s not a sure thing—the story goes that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been “closely watching” Tumblr and discussing a possible acquisition with Tumblr execs, including founder and CEO David Karp. The dollar amount comes from Adweek, which notes that “the deal is not done, but could reach as high as $1 billion.”

With how big Tumblr’s gotten I’m frankly surprised it hasn’t gotten purchased already. It was always going to happen, if not with Yahoo!, than with someone else. Says Adweek:

…the company had been rumored to be struggling to raise more funding until recently. “They are looking for a liquidity event,” said one source. And Yahoo big ad sales force could help Tumblr ramp up its nascent revenue, while exposing the social networking/blogging behemoth to a wealth of new customers.

What might the purchase mean for Tumblr? Ads, for one: Everyone has bills to pay. Other than that I don’t know; we’ll just have to wait and see. Speaking as a Tumblr user, the people who run the site now do it weirdly: They add all these things that no one wants (changing icons, adding a button so you can e-mail posts, making it so you can’t include a link in a direct message to someone) and ignore the ones that people want to see, like a chat feature. A lot of the things people want are pretty  major and, I would imagine, heavily work-intensive, so an infusion of money courtesy of Yahoo! could in theory let Tumblr do some of them.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I really want a chat feature, guys.

(via: Death and Taxes)

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