SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo! Inc. is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet pioneer that has fallen behind the times.
The deal announced Monday is Mayer’s priciest move since she left Google Inc. 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, Calif., company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.
Yahoo is paying mostly cash for Tumblr, dipping into what remains of a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will use up about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.
While hailing Tumblr as a fount of creativity that attracts 300 million visitors each month, Mayer told analysts Monday that she is “making a sincere promise to not screw it up.” David Karp, a high-school dropout who started Tumblr six years ago, will remain in control of the service in an effort to retain the same “irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators,” Yahoo said.
Karp, 26, may now have a managerial mentor in Mayer, 37. Tumblr, which will remain based in New York, has about 175 employees while Yahoo has 11,300 workers.
Mayer, who worked closely with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during her time at the company, had high praise for Karp during Monday’s conference call. “David Karp is one of the most inspiring, insightful entrepreneurs that I have ever met,” she said.
In his statement, Karp predicted Yahoo would help Tumblr grow even faster as he strives “to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. “
The deal is expected to close during the second half of this year.
Tumblr will now play a role in Mayer’s attempt to reshape Yahoo. To take on the challenge, Mayer ended a successful 13-year career at Google, which she helped surpass Yahoo as the Internet’s most influential company. Since coming to Yahoo, Mayer has concentrated on improving employee morale, redesigning services and bringing in more engineering talent through a series of small acquisitions that have collectively cost less than $50 million.
Yahoo will still focus on mostly small deals, Mayer said. She seized the opportunity to buy Tumblr because she believes the service can accelerate her efforts to turn around Yahoo, she said.
“Tumblr is a game changer,” Mayer assured analysts.
As popular as Tumblr has become, the service remains unprofitable. That is likely to raise questions about whether Yahoo paid too much in Mayer’s zeal to gain control over a hot service. Facebook Inc. faced similar doubts last year when it bought Instagram, a rapidly growing photo sharing site, that also hadn’t been trying to make money.
Facebook initially agreed to pay $1 billion in stock for Instagram, but the value had fallen to $715 million by the time that deal closed. Facebook still hasn’t proven it will be able to make money off of Instagram.
Mayer’s efforts at Yahoo have been well-received on Wall Street so far, although most of the roughly 70 percent surge in Yahoo’s stock price under Mayer’s leadership has been driven by the rising value of Yahoo’s remaining 24percent stake in Alibaba. When Alibaba goes public within the next few years, analysts have estimated Yahoo could collect another $10 billion to $20 billion by selling the rest of its Alibaba stock.
If this deal pays off the way Mayer envisions, Tumblr could help Yahoo finally get its stock price to $33. That would be a coup, because many investors soured on Yahoo after a previous regime led by co-founder Jerry Yang squandered an opportunity five years ago to sell the entire company to Microsoft for $33 per share. The stock spent more than four years trading below $20 before the recent surge. The shares gained 6 cents Monday to close at $26.58.
The deal could backfire, though, if Yahoo’s effort to make more money alienates a Tumblr user base that so far has been subjected to hardly any advertising during the service’s six-year history.
“Yahoo has to manage this acquisition in a way that keeps Tumblr’s user base while trying to add advertising, which historically tends to turn off a lot of people,” said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.
Mayer said Yahoo will work with Tumblr to create ads that “are tasteful and seamless.” The company expects Tumblr to start increasing Yahoo’s revenue next year.
Mayer is betting that Tumblr will provide Yahoo with a hook to reel in more traffic and advertisers on smart phones and tablet computers. That rapidly growing market is expected to become even more important during the next decade as people increasingly consume digital content on mobile devices instead of laptop and desktop machines.
More than half of Tumblr’s users connect to the service through the mobile app and engage in an average of seven sessions per day.
“I would characterize Tumblr as being ahead of Yahoo in terms of its work on mobile,” Mayer said.
Business, Pages 25 on 05/21/2013