Yahoo was a big name about a decade ago, by leading the offerings on the internet from messaging applications, email, web portals, and so on. However, since the explosion of social media, Yahoo has been slow to evolve, leaving them behind little by little.
However, Yahoo did not remain silent, and has appointed a former Google executive, Marissa Mayer, to lead Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo had made some drastic changes to their services.
Through a special interview with Tech Brew, the former CEO of Yahoo now shares some things that were overlooked at the time.
According to Marissa Mayer, when making a purchase with the purpose of transformation, Yahoo bought Tumblr at a value of $1.3 billion.
Interestingly, at the same time, Yahoo was also considering whether they could also buy streaming services Hulu or Netflix. At the time, it was estimated that Netflix was worth around $4 billion, while Hulu was around $1.3 billion. In retrospect, Marissa Mayer says a takeover of either of the two streaming services might have had a better impact than Tumblr.
The Tumblr that was taken over by Yahoo! experienced various phases, including when one phase of the application was blocked in the AppStore and many left the platform.
After that, Yahoo! itself had problems, and was sold to Verizon. Last year in 2019, Tumblr, which was not very profitable, was sold to Automattic, which also manages WordPress, at an estimated value of less than $3 million.