Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.
So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore. (via jakke)
This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit. Just off the top of my head, how could Yahoo! leverage Tumblr:
- Use Tumblr to surface popular/emerging content for the various Yahoo! branded home pages that are provided to enterprise customers;
- Offer free blogging services to enterprise customers;
- Integrate Flickr’s communities (somehow) withTumblr to enhance finding and sharing original content;
- Leverage Tumblr to expand Bing search capabilities (which would be part of the Yahoo!/MS search integration, and perhaps offer Yahoo! another line of revenue given Microsoft’s current pursuit of Social searchability)
- Generally provide customized blogging solutions across properties. If Tumblr is eventually de-siloed then Yahoo! would have a blogging platform like Google (i.e. Blogger) except it would be ‘fresh’ like Blogger was at the time of Google acquiring it.
Those are just the most immediate thoughts. I really think that what happens will occur over time and not tomorrow; Yahoo! needs to get ‘integration right’ or else risk drowning their new $1.1 billion dollar baby.
Excited Pixels 