In Case You Haven’t Heard, Tumblr Has Been Bought by Yahoo!

I say “in case,” because there were rumors of this last week, and Yahoo announced that they’d be announcing the purchase of Tumblr yesterday, and even when I turned on the radio this morning, it to hear legitimate news outlets attempting to talk about the ball of bizarre that is the Tumblr blogging platform. I also say “in case,” because Tumblrers have been understandably flipping their wigs about it, so I should say up front, “in case,” that the above image isn’t an officially changed logo, it’s just something that the internet whipped up in the past few days. Other things the internet has whipped up in the past few days? The idea that Yahoo is going to eradicate fandom blogs from Tumblr.

Yeah. That’s not a real thing, gullible underbelly of Tumblr. Lets talk about real things.

Yahoo!, a company without a lot of youth appeal in the current internet age, nor a lot of experience in social networks or mobile technologies; has purchased Tumblr, a company that needs money, for somewhere around $1.1 billion.

[Tumblr] burned through an estimated $25 million in cash last year, and struggled to raise additional money at an acceptable valuation, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. That prompted [founder David Karp] to begin deal discussions with a number of companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google, though nothing came of those talks.

Karp allayed concerns that the acquisition would mean sweeping changes in Tumblr headquarters this morning “We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing.” In his words, Yahoo! is going to allow them to do more to improve Tumblr, faster, and he maintains that the two companies have convergent goals for Tumblr’s future.

So you can relax: Yahoo! isn’t going to take your meticulously curated blog full of gifsets of Dummy from the Iron Man series. In fact, they just paid $1.1 billion for it.

(via The New York Times.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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