David Karp’s decision of selling Tumblr did not meet with the positive public opinion. Some people cannot understand why he would want to get rid of such a promising business, but he had his reasons. First of all, Tumblr needs a COO and cash to keep running and growing. Moreover, the blogging portal does not generate sufficient revenues. Selling it to Mayer solves all those problems and of course makes David Karp rich enough to live off the interest. Yahoo! has also broad perspectives after the transaction. Tumblr would allow it to reach huge young audience and reinvigorate the image of the company. It is expected that Tumblr will expand Yahoo!’s audience by 50% and to grow traffic by approximately 20%. What is more, Yahoo! has limited mobile reach and mobile usage and nowadays the trend of accesing the Internet via mobile rather that computer is growing. Having Tumblr gives Yahoo! huge opporunities on that field, because more than half of Tumblr’s mobile users use the mobile app on an average of 7 sessions per day. Both Marissa Mayer and David Karp want to reasure Tumblr’s users that joining to Yahoo! will give the blogging portal more resources to develop and provide its community the product they love.

2. Tumblr Acquisition
Analysis introduction
The analysis is based on the data from the
Internet monitoring and includes contents
published in the web between 2013-05-20 and
2013-06-19, which contained following key
words: tumblr, tumblr.com, tumblr's, tumblrs. The
analysis includes 190379 mentions and shows
how the social media users received and
responded to the Tumblr’s takeover by Yahoo.

3. Tumblr Acquisition
Sources
62% of the results come from facebook.com and
almost one third from twitter.com. Other sources
do not play a significant part in the analisis. 5440
pages out of all 6628 (82%) has only one result.
Top sources:
1. Faceboom.com 118 721 results
2. Twitter.com 58 907 results
3. Youtube.com 457 results
4. HuffingtonPost.com 190 results
5. NYpost.com 176 results
facebook.com twitter.com
youtube.com others

4. Tumblr Acquisition
Number of mentions
The greatest number of mentions was gathered on the 20th of May (15903), when Yahoo officially
confirmed that it was buying blogging platform Tumblr. Untill the May 26th this amount was
successively decreasing to its regular level of 3-4 thousands. Small fluctuations during the reaming
period were connected with changes which Yahoo! implemented to the blogging platform.

5. Tumblr Acquisition
Number of mentions only on Twitter
Number of all mentions excluding Twitter
Twitter
mentions
The graphs above
present changes in
the number of
mentions on
particular days
separately on Twitter
and the rest of
sources. The results
indicate that
fluctuations after the
May 30th were
caused mainly by the
changes in buzz on
Twitter. On other
websites and social
networking services
mentions kept on the
constant level.

6. Tumblr Acquisition
Sentiment analysis for all of
contents
During the concerning period results include 3%
positive mentions and 10% negative ones*. The
biggest part of neutral mentions concerns
requests for following different tumblr’s profiles.
* Based on the sample of 3071 of mentions
Positive
3%
Neutral
87%
Negative
10%

7. Tumblr Acquisition
Sentiment of contents
connected with Yahoo!
Taking into consideration only those mentions
which directly concern an issue of taking over
Tumblr by Yahoo! (16470), the percentage of
negative sentiment is almost twice higher.*
Tumblr’s users are not content with the merger,
because they are afraid that Yahoo! will destroy
the blogging platform with new changes.
* Based on the sample of 969 of mentions
Positive
2%
Neutral
79%
Negative
19%

8. Sample mentions

9. Tumblr Acquisition
negative

10. Tumblr Acquisition
negative

11. Tumblr Acquisition
positive

12. Tumblr Acquisition
Sentiment of mentions
excluding Yahoo!
Analyzing only the results which do not contain
the word „yahoo” negative mentions make up
150% of the positive ones*. It indicates that
people are not satisfied with the changes which
were introduced to Tumblr after 20th of May.
Amongst the reason of discontent the most
common are worse layout, difficulties with
updates, new position of reblog button and
confusing dashboard. However, some bloggers
came to like the changes.
* Based on the sample of 2102 of mentions
Positive
4%
Neutral
91%
Negative
5%

13. Tumblr Acquisition
positive

14. Tumblr Acquisition
negative

15. Tumblr Acquisition
Follow on Tumblr
Even though, Yahoo buying Tumblr
aroused a huge wave of discussion of
the issue, the greatest number of
mentions contain web links of tumblr
profiles and requests for following them.
In the analisis appeared in total 95297
results with the world „tumblr.com”,
„follow” or both of them jointly, which
makes up 50% of all mentions.

16. Tumblr Acquisition
Summary
David Karp’s decision of selling Tumblr did not meet with the positive public opinion. Some people cannot
understand why he would want to get rid of such a promising business, but he had his reasons. First of all, Tumblr
needs a COO and cash to keep running and growing. Moreover, the blogging portal does not generate sufficient
revenues. Selling it to Mayer solves all those problems and of course makes David Karp rich enough to live off the
interest.
Yahoo! has also broad perspectives after the transaction. Tumblr would allow it to reach huge young audience and
reinvigorate the image of the company. It is expected that Tumblr will expand Yahoo!’s audience by 50% and to grow
traffic by approximately 20%. What is more, Yahoo! has limited mobile reach and mobile usage and nowadays the
trend of accesing the Internet via mobile rather that computer is growing. Having Tumblr gives Yahoo! huge
opporunities on that field, because more than half of Tumblr’s mobile users use the mobile app on an average of 7
sessions per day.
Both Marissa Mayer and David Karp want to reasure Tumblr’s users that joining to Yahoo! will give the blogging
portal more resources to develop and provide its community the product they love.

17. Tumblr Acquisition
External sources
According to Quantcast Tumblr had 190
million unique visitors and 14 billion page
views in the month preceding its takeover.
Those numbers have decreased
accordingly 3% and 11% between the
May 20th and June 19th. Even though,
these drop seems to ensue from recent
changes, it might be just a temporary
trend.
Data collected from: https://www.quantcast.com/

18. Tumblr Acquisition
Conclusion
The research showed that selling Tumblr might not be the best solution for the blogging portal.
Data gathered from almost 20 thousands mentions indicates that the number of users who are not
satisfied with the merger is 10 times higher than the number of those who are rather content with
the change. The significant part of Tumblr’s fans expressed their negative opinion about Yahoo!,
which do not enjoy the best reputation lately. However, the number of posts with links to distinctive
Tumblr’s profiles still keep on the constant, high level. It means, that even though some users
complain about all the changes introduced by Yahoo!, they do not seem to leave the portal, at least
for now.

19. An Overview of the Analysis Tool

21. About
Brand24.
Brand24 is a powerful, yet affordable tool
for real-time social media monitoring and
analytics. Designed to keep track of
online conversations about your brand
and products. Brand24 collects real-time
social data from millions of sources.
Our web-based dashboard provides
actionable customer insights, email
alerts, influencer analysis, automated &
customized PDF reports, infographics
and many more. Brand24 allows you to
measure key metrics around buzz and
sentiment.

22. Awards & Achievements

23. Brand24
Social Media Monitoring
Natalia Chrzanowska
natalia.chrzanowska@brand24.net
Mike Sadowski
mike@brand24.net
Twitter@SocialMemos
wwww.brand24.net
facebook.com/brand24
twitter.com/brand24app
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