At some point, it was clear that this strategy changed.  Here’s Hunter Walk’s story of what happened:

Stop Short Term Monetization That Won’t Scale

YouTube was just starting to earn revenue via a host of banner ads and one-off branded campaigns. Neither of these were going to be important longterm and many of the programs put money in our pocket, but passed through little benefit to content creators because they sold YouTube inventory. It took a good 18 months but under the right goals and leadership the cross functional team started sunsetting this stuff for more scalable monetization products which put money in content creators’ pockets.

via Elapsed Time: Don’t Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned from YouTube.

via Pinterest takes a “first step” toward working with big brands — Tech News and Analysis.

#nativeads

The ads will look like normal posts from other Tumblr users, appearing in users’ personal news feeds.

via Tumblr’s Ad Sales Pitch Deck – Business Insider.

#nativeads

via Yahoo! Intends to Stuff Tumblr Full Of Ads – Business Insider.

Juxtapose that to this article on flickr: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

There may also be another benefit to not integrating– it’s easier to sell off if you never integrate it in the first place.

Yang’s statement is closest to what Yahoo has aspired be — “the most essential starting point” for Internet users — and struggled to become as it was lapped by Google, Facebook and others who developed very profitable services that prevailed over Yahoo’s.

via Reviving Yahoo: Marissa Mayer’s grand challenge | Internet & Media – CNET News.

This is a Yang quote but it still speaks to the core appeal of what Yahoo was (and wants to return to) when everyone went to their my.yahoo page to get the digital content.

As I’ve stated before, as marketers get more demanding for multi-screen metrics, Yahoo needs to increase their PVs of logged in users.  On paper, they’ve reversed this the growth trends for those metrics through this acquisition.

What happens after Yahoo acquires you by Matt Linderman of 37signals.

Below is a full list of Yahoo’s acquisitions since 2005. How many can be described as success stories?

Those who are talking about the search monetization value of Tumblr (to Yahoo) forget or are too young to remember the failed Google / Myspace experiments.

 

 

Google settled with the government in August 2011, agreeing to pay a $500 million corporate forfeiture that was one of the biggest in US history at the time. As part of the agreement, the company acknowledged that it had helped presumably Canadian online pharmacies use AdWords as early as 2003, that it knew US customers were buying drugs through these ads, that advertisers were selling drugs without requiring prescriptions, and that Google employees actively helped advertisers circumvent their own pharmaceutical policies and third-party verification services.

via How a Career Con Man Led a Federal Sting That Cost Google $500 Million | Threat Level | Wired.com.

It’s easiest to think through these from Marissa Mayer’s point of view, not Yahoo’s.  The CEO role isn’t all about doing what’s immediately best for Yahoo.  Sometimes politics forces you to take the longer path to getting where you want to go.

Practically speaking, Yahoo has a lot more pressing needs right now.  For example, their ad tech stack is hurting and could use some help.  However, the practical view is not good at accounting for things that are hard to quantify such as company morale and influence of the leadership.  These aren’t practical times at Yahoo.

I won’t discuss the idea that Tumblr could reinvigorate company morale because that’s pretty simple.  I also won’t discuss the idea that Yahoo wants to own a consumer brand that people care about for the same reasons.

Not many people are really thinking about the idea of Marissa Mayer buying metrics.  I’m talking about UVs and PVs.  History doesn’t asterisk UV/PV charts and any reversal or upward trajectory is usually credited to leadership’s effort.  In other words, Marissa might be buying a downside risk insurance policy.  Once Tumblr’s users counts, PVs, and UVs get folded into Yahoo totals, they won’t continue to provide breakouts so we won’t know what’s really going on.

The high level monetization math is: Yahoo’s sales force + Tumblr and native monetization = Growth.  I’ve always argued that most of the big sites don’t have a usage problem, they have a monetization problem.  Yahoo makes it harder to make that argument because their usage is declining but weakness with monetization is the bigger issue.

Acquiring Tumblr is a stepping stone strategy.  Tumblr is not the solution but maybe it’s the first of a few chess moves to get to a solution.  I suppose if there is a takeaway from this post, it’s that I find most blog posts about Yahoo acquiring Tumblr uninteresting because they fail to consider the politics in the situation.  It’s a  crucial constraint and if you remove it from the problem, the answer you arrive at is vastly different than the correct one.

Reddit’s ad sales pitch deck is fantastic for two reasons.

First, it has lots of amazing facts about the sheer size of “the front page of the internet.” Reddit’s 70 million monthly readers spent an average of 20 minutes on the site, and looked at 5 billion of its pages, for instance.

Second, it’s hilarious.

via Reddit’s Ad Sales Pitch Deck – Business Insider.