“Tumblr’s employees will also do well. The company’s first 10 employees will receive an average of $6.2 million in cash; the first 30 will receive an average of $3.3 million in cash, and the rest of the 178 employees will each receive $371,000.”
I don’t do pictures with “famous people” but when the cowboy from The Village People demands you take a picture with him at a charity event and then further demands you take his number so you can text it to him, you just don’t say no.
The real reason Yahoo bought Tumblr: It’s about young women.
More detail from Think Progress’ very smart analysis:
[W]hen Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.
Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.
That sentence I put in bold is basically the exact point of the panel that Rae led at SXSW (where, by the way, we were the only all-female panel during the tech conference, and where Tumblr was very well-repped by Danielle Strle).
Start taking it seriously.
Tumblr + Young People, and especially Young Women. I wish I had a a billion dollars.
German Smurfs, Gizblow the coked up Gremlin, Human Fire Extinguishers, Ben Affleck and is that Ryan Seacrest? No it’s a drowned albino who looks like Axl Rose.