So I've closed down my Tumblr art account.... and life goes on pleasantly. Plus I've got a ton of other stuff posted in this blog and on other accounts, and a lot of work to do for my next DSNG Chronicles ebook....Yesterday I found an article from 2017, which talked about the Absolute Clusterfuck that took place at Yahoo, when their female CEO boldly bought Tumblr in 2013 for roughly 1.1 Billion dollars...
She even playfully said something in the press conference like: "Don't worry, we won't screw this up..."
BTW: I'm not going to mention her name, you can find out that stuff for yourself later. I'm using this blog to make an analytical point, and not to toss rocks at someone who may have actually done her best, in a position of authority...
Anyway, less than 2 years after the billion-dollar purchase, the Tumblr purchase was being considered as a complete tax write-off & a failed investment.
The article that I read by Yuyu Chen shows a corporate perspective of what happened with the big purchase, while showing the thoughts of those top executives in Yahoo, versus the thoughts of those that worked in Tumblr.
Basically, none of the executives in Yahoo [in their late-40s and 50s] knew what the Tumblr users [from ages 15 to 35] were really all about.
In retrospect, the CEO of Yahoo really should have had a lengthy discussion with the founders of Tumblr, to see if they could generate a fully detailed year-long plan that showcased how they could monetize and generate Ad-revenue from their Website, after it was bought over.
Plus the Yahoo execs should have had their own corporately created detailed year-long plan about how Tumblr could be monetized, while showing that plan to the Tumblr folks, and getting feedback on the possible implementation strategy and the limitations in advance, before the buyout was done. Such plans should have been presented as guidelines of progress, which would be checked every 2 months, for the entire first year.
Instead, shortly after the big purchase was made [and there was little or no research by Yahoo on how to actually generate money from over 350 million young Tumblr users, mostly the millennials], then the lady CEO of Yahoo merely made a decree that she wanted to see at least 100 million dollars in Ad revenue sales-per-year coming from Tumblr, after a starting window of 2 years.
.....Holy Bogus Bullshit Batman.....
No one knew how the hell she came up with that huge projected profit figure... not even her. She had no plan for it, no strategy, and no advise for how the Tumblr site owners should do it. And neither did the Tumblr site admins have any idea of how to do it... after all, Tumblr had been around for roughly 9 years previously [it was founded in 2007], and it wasn't generating money. I believe a marketing firm was brought in to assist the Tumblr admins, and that didn't help at all.
Basically, she wanted to pull a big fat rabbit out of a big hat... but the hat didn't even exist. She would have known that, if the extensive research & investigations had been humbly done, perhaps for 4 to 6 months in advance of the purchase.
Eventually, the teenagers on Tumblr started seeing weird out-of-place Ads for "Retirement Benefits" in their user feeds.... and such Ads were promptly ignored.
The insightful article with more details by journalist Yuyu Chen is over here: https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/
Check it out when you've got like 3 minutes to spare....
Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the aftermath at Tumblr.
