Yahoos reinvention is going rather well – despite detractors condemning Marissa Mayer’s strategy since she joined Yahoo in July 2012. Last Monday it announced that it was going to pay 1.1 billion to buy the popular microblogging site Tumblr.
Tumblr with over 108 million blogs has been around since 2006. It specialises in short form blogs, known as tumblelogs. These microblogs feature links, images and short posts or status updates and are easy to upload from mobile phones.
Yahoo now intends to include display ads on Tumblr blogs. Ads are really important to Tumblr – over half of Tumblr’s visitor base is under the age of 25. Younger users tend to be early adopters of technology and drive site popularity. It is not surprising that advertisers will want to place as many ads as possible on Tumblr to attract clicks from this age group.
Yahoo intends to use two types of ads. It will include ‘normal display ads’ which appear on the Tumblr blog if agreed with the blogger. The revenue is then split with the blogger. The other type of ad, ‘native ads’, will appear in your news stream just like a blog post.
The difference is, readers will start to see posts that appear on their Tumblr feeds from brand bloggers that they did not elect to follow. These posts are similar to the featured post in Facebook – but these extra posts are really paid for ads.
Yahoo wants to put brands ‘front and centre’ by placing ads in the users’ stream. All Tumblr post types ‘will be supported’.
Tumblr delivers 20 billion page views and 225 million unique visitors per month and gets 24 billion page views per month in engagement.
But Yahoo wasn’t content with just buying Tumblr.
It has also announced a redesign for ailing Flickr giving its users 1Tb of storage space for free. Yahoo claimed that it was offering the most free space offered by an Internet company.
The Flickr redesign is visually appealing. Larger image formats show photos display in a timeline format. Focus is on image display and giving screen estate to pictures.
The intention is for users to store their whole lifetime in photos. And with 1Tb of free storage, it is possible to do this.
Pro users, who previously had access to 1Tb of storage space can continue with their pro membership – at a reduced annual fee of $25. These accounts will remain ad-free in Flickr and get unlimited space – i.e. more than 1Tb if you ever needed that much storage. You can not now create a pro user account.
Under Mayer’s leadership, Yahoo seems to have a strong vision.
To capture the cool kids on the Internet, and make Flickr cool.
Since Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, its stock has risen from 15.65 to over 25.81.
The cool kids on the Internet are getting a place to share and search for content.
They are influencing the next generation of internet-savvy users who live on their mobile devices and tablets. They have conversations with their peers and are driving adoption of social platforms.
Yahoo wants a piece of that action. And with its Tumblr acquisition and revamp of Flickr, it intends to make sure it gets it.
Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.