Yahoo’s stride looks interesting. Marissa Mayer announced the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr at a press event on May 20th. This audacious deal seems to be beneficial for Yahoo to aggregate Tumblr’s young users into Yahoo’s business territory. After its press release of the purchase of Tumblr, Yahoo opened its new service strategy for a photo service – Flickr. Wholly renewed with enormous space, Flickr aggressively provides a powerful free service to users based on Yahoo’s advertisement platform.
Photos and videos are particularly hot contents in the internet platform which entices users to continue using the service. Despite this importance of photos, we do not know whether Flickr will regain its market initiative, which is likely to be grabbed by Google’s Picasa or other vertical players such as Pinterest. In this sense, although Tumblr will be operated independently for the time being, what Yahoo is trying through Tumblr is a meaningful step to create synergy to empower Flickr as platform while Tumblr utilizes diverse Yahoo’s portfolio assets including advertisement.
As we see this trend in which cloud services try to collaborate with SNS, a series of Yahoo’s strategic movement illuminates a path that other players have to choose. Google and facebook have already interconnected their SNS functions with contents and expanded its contents domain into video and articles. For the big players, it is now a question of how to connect these two assets based upon big data analysis and differentiated technical functions rather than how to achieve sizable user base.
Yahoo’s press event: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2013/may/20/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-live-stream