Top 3 Gainers from Yahoo’s Tumblr Acquisition

Top 3 Gainers from Yahoo’s Tumblr Acquisition

Yahoo surprised us by announcing a billion dollar acquisition of Tumblr this past week. There’s been a lot of debate about whether Tumblr’s competitors can benefit from this acquisition since Yahoo is likely to “screw up” Tumblr one way or the other. Will Tumblr eventually lose its unique identity? If so, which company will benefit from it?

 

To start with, we need information about Tumblr’s target users. Tumblr has been very popular among teenagers. You can never go wrong once you get those teenagers as your customers. They spread words virally if they find something “cool”, get addicted to things more easily, and spend a lot of time creating, decorating, and reblogging contents! Teens who don’t want to share anything on Facebook have been expressing their creativity and voice on Tumblr. It’s like their “secret” blog where they can be anyone they want to be and say whatever they want to say. It’s a perfect platform to do so because it’s anonymous, your friends or parents wouldn’t know about it, and you’re free to post anything you want (even porn!). Other target users include small businesses, creative artists, and college students, but they don’t create and reblog as often. Teens have indubitably made Tumblr popular and go viral.

Since Yahoo announced its acquisition of Tumblr, many Tumblr users have complained that they will “ruin” Tumblr and have even threatened that they will leave to use other platforms like WordPress. Will a lot of users leave Tumblr in the future? What will happen then? 

Here’s a list of top 3 gainers from Yahoo’s Tumblr Acquisition. (This is solely based on my opinion, so feel free to share your thoughts by leaving comments!)

1. WordPress

WordPress.com is a popular blog web hosting service provider owned by Automattic. Since Yahoo’s announcement of acquisition, many people migrated their blog from Tumblr to WordPress. Why? Because it’s super-easy to import your contents from Tumblr! I personally imported all of my contents to WordPress and it took about 15 minutes to migrate 2000 contents that I had on Tumblr. Not bad, huh? (FYI, my WP link is https://gingerbunnyme.wordpress.com) I can definitely see more people doing the same if something bad happens to Tumblr (i.e., too much advertising, other users leaving, not many great contents..). If their most popular users are leaving, their followers are likely to follow as well.

 

2. Pinterest

It’s interesting to see whether and how Pinterest would benefit from Yahoo’s Tumblr acquisition. Pinterest’s target users are quite different from Tumblr’s: it’s popular among women, rich, adults under 50, with some college education (Source: Pew Research Center). 

Once Tumblr users migrate to Pinterest and start “pinning” like crazy, Pinterest’s demographics and its contents will change significantly. What will happen if Pinterest gets both teenagers and older, richer women? Can it be the most popular social media in the U.S., surpassing Twitter or Facebook?

 

 

3. Instagram

Instagram is very similar to Tumblr in many aspects. They both heavily rely on photos, are mobile-friendly, and their target users are also similar as Instagram is also popular among teens and people in their 20s. Instagram was also acquired by Facebook, so it’s interesting to see whether Instagram will be able to allure some Tumblr users after Yahoo’s acquisition. (Some Instagram users were angry about Facebook’s acquisition, but many decided to stay because there are no other great alternatives.)

The main difference between Instagram and Tumblr is that Instagram’s contents tend to be much more “personal” than Tumblr’s. I see a lot of photos of celebrities, cute people, fashion, food, art, and funny, gif on Tumblr, whereas I see a lot of “real” contents on Instagram like photos of themselves and their friends and family. Because their contents are quite different, it’s more likely that Tumblr users will start pinning on Pinterest than posting on Instagram. 

Do you use Tumblr? Are you going to migrate to another platform or are you going to stay? To which platform will you move? Please share your opinions by leaving comments!