Queue Queen

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
cyle
one-time-i-dreamt

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reveals she regrets buying Tumblr instead of Netflix or Hulu.  Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion, but by the time it was sold in 2019, the value of the platform was reportedly down to $3 million. pic.twitter.com/YfH5dpL4Kf  — Pop Base (@PopBase) May 7, 2023ALT

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

red-mercer

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

sreegs

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

noctumsolis

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

sreegs

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

sreegs

image

yeah no this happened captain reddit

cyle

this did happen. (i was also there, probably sitting next to or very near @sreegs. there's your multiple witnesses! checkmate reddit!!!!!!)

however it's never really sat well with me that this was the thing that folks clung on to as "insane" from yahoo -- the real context of the "new PDF" quote actually makes more sense, sorta:

  • the quote is from the then-head of the yahoo vertical (entertainment i think?) who was in charge of tumblr (and david karp) and other parts of yahoo like yahoo news and yahoo sports (i think). he was remarkably hands-off with tumblr and was actually a cheerleader for us most of the time. this was one of those times!
  • the spiel he was giving was hyping up our plans to build NPF -- literally a new format for information that we wanted to use everywhere on the site and spread out across the internet as a new standard. kinda like how PDF is a file format, sure. we ended up using it for posts and a few other things here on tumblr; it never got much further than that.
  • PDFs were synonymous at the time with Adobe, and gave them huge market share and revenue. yahoo was hoping NPF and Tumblr could be similar to the PDF and Adobe situation. that'd be pretty cool. that's a great marketing idea!

so it kinda makes sense, in a weird roundabout way. and the person's job was mostly to hype these things to other tech people. and ... that positive attention probably helped keep tumblr around for another year or two, it's not like we were making yahoo any money!! i think we (at tumblr) were just so allergic to corporate-sounding tech-hype people that we totally missed that he was actually in our corner and helping us survive.

the delivery of the quote and further context around the quote was kinda tone-deaf and cringey, to be sure. i remember some other choice parts of that same presentation that are really, really bad in hindsight. none of that made it out to the press. i am not going to talk about it publicly, so don't ask.

there were much, much more insane things that yahoo did or tried to do, in regards to tumblr. but even then, maybe only 10% of tumblr's roadmap was ever dictated by yahoo, as far as i ever saw. they actually gave us a boatload of money to keep the site and office running, even though we only ever costed them dollars. that part is kinda wild, in hindsight.

sreegs

cyle am i remembering this correctly or not, was david karp put in charge of yahoo answers for a hot minute?

cyle

yes, for two or three months. i remember exactly when it happened, because it was a friday and it was in a random email, and being the only person to read emails, i ran around the office laughing about it. at that day's All Team i asked "can we please do something fun with yahoo answers?" and david's answer was something like "i only found out i was in charge of it an hour ago, how did you know? also i have no idea why they put me in charge of it, i have no idea what to do with it."

and i think i badgered him again about it at a product review meeting the next week, and at that point it was clear he did not want to waste a single brain cell on it, and they shut it down soon after. i think david was well out the door at that point anyway. i don't blame him for having freedom on his mind rather than yahoo answers.