The board of Web giant Yahoo has reportedly agreed to a deal today to purchase the popular social network site ‘Tumblr’ for $1.1 billion. If the acquisition takes place, it would be the biggest deal for Yahoo under its CEO Marissa Mayer, who took charge of Yahoo last year.
The proposed acquisition would also be the largest of a social networking company in years, exceeding Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram last year.
Support Independent Journalism? Keep us live.
Some earlier reports said that, to attract huge number of users in the age group of 18 to 24, Yahoo was planning to acquire some cool social networking site, where Tumblr was at the top of the list.
Tumblr has 107 million blogs and 50 billion postings in 12 languages besides its working strength of 175 employees as per the company, which was founded in 2007, headquartered in New York and headed by the 26-year-old David Karp. The website ranking site Alexa putsTumblr at number 32 in terms of global popularity.
While Yahoo is preparing to take up Tumblr, analysts are worried whether the web giant can make enough money or not from this deal at a time when even Facebook faces continued pressure from investors. Business can only come, if Yahoo can play something on the Mobile device, which has evolved as the primary source of internet surfing these days.
Following completion of this deal Ms. Mayer will have to face the challenge of successfully managing the takeover because earlier though Yahoo had acquired Flickr and GeoCities for $35 million and $3.6 billion respectively, but these acquisitions could not bring any big success to Yahoo.