rfmcdonald | [LINK] Two notes on Yahoo's work with Tumblr and Flickr

Yahoo, as any number of news media (like the Financial Post, has bought Tumblr.

Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.

Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.

Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.

Yahoo has also radically upgraded Flickr.

[T]he big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.

Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.

As a long-time Flickr user, I'm excited by the upgrade. As a novice Tumblr user, I only hope Yahoo doesn't screw it up (the fact that Marissa Mayer has had to promise not to do that worries me). I do find it worth noting that, between Flickr and Tumblr and my Yahoo Mail account, I make more use of my Yahoo account than I do my Google account, and that with the impending demise of Google Reader my usage of Google will diminish accordingly. I just use Google to search; I do my business on Yahoo.

Is this common, I wonder?