News broke over the weekend that Yahoo! would acquire blogging platform Tumblr for approximately $1.1 billion.
Many in the business and technology industry believe the acquisition is a smart one for Yahoo! (but it has its detractors too). Tumblr now has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day. It's not just those raw numbers however, but likely the engagement metrics that Yahoo! was most interested in tapping into.
Tumblr sees in excess of 900 posts per second and 24 billion minutes are spent on the site each month. But it gets even better from the perspective of Yahoo, who has its sights set clearly on mobile, as more than half of Tumblr's users are using the platform's mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day.
The deal offers interesting opportunities for both companies. Tumblr will be able to deploy Yahoo!'s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help users discover creators, curators, and content and Tumblr in turn will bring 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!'s media network and search experiences. Expect the two companies to start working on creating advertising opportunities immediately.
Reports from early this morning indicate that Yahoo-Tumblr will have advertising on the network as early as 2014. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer revealed that she doesn't care if Tumblr visitors don't visit Yahoo!, which indicates (at least to me) that, thanks to Yahoo's aggressive behavioral marketing and personalization efforts, this may be more about acquiring an audience (advertising inventory) to leverage its relatively robust advertising technology.
If you're not on Tumblr yet, you may want to check out Website Magazine's 5 Tips for Taking Over Tumblr.