Fans of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer say she shouldn’t be blamed for the company’s history of failed acquisitions — but there are plenty of other reasons to be skeptical about Yahoo’s $1.1-billion Tumblr deal. Read more »
What are teenagers up to on social media? Twitter use has grown dramatically since 2011, while Facebook stays dominant but shows flat growth. Read more »
More news from Yahoo on Monday: The company is revamping photo-sharing service Flickr and is also opening a New York City office. Tumblr’s employees, however, will remain at their current office. Read more »
There are plenty of reasons why the announced Yahoo Tumblr deal makes sense for those companies. But Marissa Mayer might have seen a much greater payoff from acquiring Pinterest instead. Here’s why. Read more »
Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson continue a long tradition of a couple investors utterly dominating their sectors by betting on what they know, and getting in early before others even know there is an opportunity. Read more »
In an investor call Monday morning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Yahoo and Tumblr’s audiences really don’t overlap. She said that’s fine: Yahoo users will be exposed to more Tumblr content, and Tumblr gets a new ad strategy and possible Flickr integration while remaining a separate site. Read more »
Yahoo has officially acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the companies announced Monday morning. Tumblr will be operated as a separate business, with David Karp remaining CEO. Read more »
Pinterest is unveiling a new pin structure for different types of products and an integration with a large number of retail brands, as it continues buildng up the platform and paving the way for growth. Read more »
Yahoo’s board has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, according to reports. Read more »
Fans of the social-blogging network might not like the idea much, but a $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr would arguably solve a number of problems for Yahoo — and do the same for Tumblr CEO David Karp. Read more »
Tumblr might become part of Yahoo as early as Sunday night, according to a report that suggests Yahoo’s board of directors is set to consider a $1.1 billion offer for the startup. Read more »
The battle of adults versus teens has taken on a new format in #followateen versus #followanadult. Read more »
At our paidContent Live conference in New York, we heard about the disruption in publishing, journalism and advertising from speakers such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Read more at paidContent »
Looking to find the best blog posts on Tumblr? The company isn’t interested in telling you which blogs are the best, but it does want to improve the overall discovery process — and help the best bloggers find financial success. Read more at paidContent »
Missed the week in tech? Here is our rewind and quick take on the most important stories and some great links for your weekend reading. From Google Fiber to Tumblr to FWD.us, we got it all ready for you. Read more »
Although its Storyboard editorial operation won awards for the content it curated from the Tumblr network, founder and CEO David Karp said Tuesday the unit is being shut down and all the editorial staff are being let go. Read more at paidContent »
Tumblr updated the navigations features on its Android app Monday, and now the navigation looks a lot more modern — and a lot more like apps such as Path. Read more »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more »
Storytelling website Storybird has added a poetry web app designed to let users quickly create illustrated digital poems. Read more at paidContent »
The media outlets apart from bringing readers news and information now have to embrace a new role: become amplifiers of the right kind of news including that directly shared by sources. Here is why I think so. Read more »
The mobile platform wars heated up in a big way as 2012 came to a close. Among other trends, Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8, Android’s dominant market share grew, and mobile commerce reached record highs during the holidays. Read more »
The comments you leave on a website — are they garbage or a gold mine? Disqus says comments are more popular than you might think and has big plans to make money off them. Read more at paidContent »
Reddit, the online community that gained fame last year for a Q&A with President Obama, is said to be raising venture funding that could value the company at $400 million — and would give it ammunition to compete with other new-media players such as BuzzFeed and Tumblr. Read more at paidContent »
BuzzFeed has built the site from just a repository for animated cat GIFs into a substantial media entity, and just raised a new round of financing — and Tumblr also has a fairly deep war-chest and dreams of expansion. And both are aiming at the same targets. Read more at paidContent »
Five finalists have been chosen in 20 different categories for the 2012 Crunchies awards, and we’re proud to release the worthy nominees today. Voting for the winners starts today, and the winners will be announced January 31st. Read more »
Israel is waging war on Hamas, but it is also waging an information war using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tools. How firmly do these networks support the principle of free speech, and how do they decide what content to permit and what to remove? Read more »
Here are my notes from a conversation with David Karp, CEO & Founder of Tumblr. He talks about the social web, Tumblr’s place in this new Internet, the shift to mobile, the iPad Mini and how he has changed as a founder and entrepreneur. Read more »
When a friend or loved one dies, their online identity often continues for some time after their death, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and other networks. Is being reminded of them every time we sign into those services a good thing or a bad thing? Read more »
The popularity of image sites like Instagram and Pinterest means more photo sharing — but also more copyright infringement. If we’re to avoid the bitter experience of the music industry, image owners should look to Dreamstime’s example of turning infringers into customers. Read more at paidContent »
Many startups like Tumblr and Airbnb have become successful because they focused on filling a need that their founders had, and then turned that into a business, and there are a number of important lessons in that kind of approach for traditional media companies. Read more »
Tumblr is enjoying explosive traffic growth and jaw-dropping valuations. But so did a similar community site, GeoCities, a decade ago before it quickly imploded. Investor Fred Wilson says this time is different. Read more »
Any web service that is growing as quickly as Tumblr is should be of interest to Facebook — but especially one that focuses on creating and sharing viral social content, and one that is appealing to growing numbers of young users. Read more »
Tumblr has become a wildly popular forum for people to share pictures, stories and news within a happy and supportive community. CEO David Karp shared some insight on how this is possible on a large scale. Read more »
Just as Tumblr seems to be trying to imitate a mainstream media entity by hiring bloggers to cover political conventions, traditional media outlets are trying to become more Tumblr-like by adopting animated GIFs and other tools as a way of making their content more viral. Read more »
Google says it resolved whatever ailed its platform as a service. It was Black Friday for the web with Tumblr, Dropbox and Google App Engine all going down. It was unclear if these issues were related and/or due to a broader systemic problem. Read more »
It’s a bad week to stop sniffing glue — and to run big cloud services. Google App Engine took a hit Friday, just days after Amazon Web Services suffered another very public snafu. Read more »
GigaOM’s RoadMap conference is exactly two weeks from today and will feature speakers like Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, Tumblr CEO David Karp, fuseproject CEO Yves Behar, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, The Obvious Corporation CEO Evan Williams, MINIMAL Founder Scott Wilson and many more. Read more »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Announcing our initial speaker lineup for our 2nd RoadMap conference! Our focus this year: design in the age of connectedness. It is scheduled for Nov. 5th in SF. Some of our speakers include Kevin Systrom, Evan Williams, David Karp, Tony Fadell, Yves Behar and more. Read more »
Tumblr’s march toward self-sustainability requires more and more advertising, something the company has historically shunned. Now that it’s gotten religion on advertising, it’s bringing in a new ad sales chief Lee Brown from Groupon. Read more »
