Yahoo rolls back decision to combine Tumblr’s sales team with Yahoo’s

http://www.businessinsider.sg/yahoos-plan-to-combine-its-sales-team-with-tumblr-failed-2016-2/?op=1?r=US&IR=T#.VsDeUGQrLw4

by prostoalex • 10 years ago

61 50 10 years ago

businessinsider.sg

tacos• 10 years ago

550 million users and less than $100 million in revenue.

A penny and a half per user per month.

This company turns 10 next year.

RyJones• 10 years ago

That is an astoundingly low ARPU. I see Twitter predicts between $2.50 and $4 ARPU.

I looked for but couldn't quickly find a recent Flickr revenue breakout.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-targets-ads-logged-use...

tomjen32• 10 years ago

Flicker has a relatively low free tier and is targeted at people who are amature or professional photographers, ie people who can afford at least 2k of entry gear.

Tumblr has no paid tier and is targeted at (or mostly used by) teens and early twenty-somethings.

So I would question any direct comparision between the two.

n72• 10 years ago

... and it's even worse when you consider the site is > 10% porn.

dangerpowpow• 10 years ago

Not sure what happened but I kinda miss some(many actually) of the tumblr blogs that I had in my bookmarks, most of them return a 404.

pavlov• 10 years ago

AFAIK, Tumblr closes blogs that receive too many copyright infringement notices. That's probably the reason.

skewart• 10 years ago

I've noticed a lot of tumblr blogs I used to enjoy simply stopped being maintained by their creators. In some cases they've even been deleted.

There still seems to be a vibrant community on tumblr, but it's different from the one that flourished five or six years ago. A lot of the design-focused bloggers have simply left.

true_religion• 10 years ago

Where have they gone to? Medium?

funkyy• 10 years ago

Tumblr is a jewel in a crown of Marissa Meyer. It should be in instruction book under - how to screw huge opportunities.

nashashmi2• 10 years ago

Add Microsoft/aQuantive and HP/Autonomy to the mix as well.

rjsw• 10 years ago

I thought the jury was still out on HP and Autonomy.

Ezhik• 10 years ago

That honor still goes to Flickr.

rayalez• 10 years ago

Tumblr has a lot of potential, it could be really great, but it's not well done.

Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet. Also search is horrible, I am typing a blogger's nickname or the name of the website and his original content is nowhere in the results, only reposts and copies.

If they would just learn from medium and copied a lot of the things they did right - that would already be a huge step forward.

Then they could monetize it by allowing bloggers to advertise their blogs, or by creating a store with ebooks/merch, or a smart donation system.

aikah• 10 years ago

If they would just learn from medium

Medium is content "centric" and tries to promote "good" content or writing. Tumblr is 80% porn. There is nothing they can learn for Medium.

dawnbreez3• 10 years ago

Actually, Tumblr is 35% politics, 15% porn, and 50% random gifs of videogames.

And 95% of statistics are made up, too. It's hard to say what Tumblr actually consists of.

dudurocha• 10 years ago

Tumblr is what you want to see. For me you is porn, for my girlfriend was mostly Benedict Cumberbatch and Harry Potter gifs.

dawnbreez3• 10 years ago

There's just one thing I wanna see changed in Tumblr.

The usernames on a post are:

1>The person who just shared the post (in bold, top of post)

2>The person that 1 just shared it from (just under 1's name)

3>The actual content of the post

4>The original author of the post (grayed out and in slightly finer print)

For a site that places a lot of importance on artists (and where you can often find complaints of "art thieves"), it's kind of puzzling why the actual creator is given so little importance compared to the person who clicked the "share" button.

philh• 10 years ago

The person who clicked 'share' is the person who caused it to show up on my dash. If my dash gets too low signal-to-noise, I want to know who to unfollow.

Also, the original author isn't necessarily the main 'artist'. Sometimes most of the value comes from the replies.

I could pick words at random out of a dictionary and find something I'd change about tumblr, but that one doesn't seem too bad.

hammock• 10 years ago

Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet

We see comments like this all the time for social platforms that are in a mature lifestage: Digg, Reddit, various other forums, etc

These found success with their "poor" design and discovery, why change now, and what evidence is there that such change would alter their course?

at-fates-hands2• 10 years ago

> These found success with their "poor" design and discovery

To be fair, both Digg and Reddit have very simple interfaces which work quite well from a UI/UX perspective. And after Digg's redesign, it's actually much easier to find stuff I want to read. Reddit for better or worse, has stuck with their simple design and the users still love it after all these years.

I will agree however, both sites lack of a decent search functionality, Can't remember how many times I found something interesting on Reddit and tried to come back the next day to find it and only found stuff from a year ago after entering the entire title of the post. Digg is the same way.

meddlepal• 10 years ago

One of the major problems Tumblr has is that every user space page can and often does have a different them with wildly inconsistent UX or even bad UX (like the people who play MIDI music like it's 1999 all over again).

user_00012• 10 years ago

it is just slow full stop. Had to sign up an account the other day, the signup process just repeatedly failed for no reason. Eventually figured out, "ahhh the 2mb background gif has to download before can signup"....

Same issue for logins

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

Yup, this is what happens when you force through "integrations" on a profitable, smaller organisation with your larger, slower organisation.

You get:

* integration technical problems

* power struggles

* dominance by the bigger group, and a lack of understanding what made the smaller company work so well

* some of your best people leave. If you mishandle it, lots of your best people leave.

* a major slowdown in any growth whilst largely valueless politics and questionable business practices distract the original company and they take their eye off the ball

Honestly, precisely how many tech takeovers really work? The CEO and board gets this great idea that they can buy a hot company to turn around the fortunes of their existing company. Then they take all their inefficiencies, bad ideas, politics, incompetence and total lack on insight and corporate memory and force that upon the company they bought. They normally chuck out the original management (not always, but frequently) who made it all work in the first place, then they start imposing changes on customers, leading to pissed off customers. A good example is that the taken-over company has support processes that work quite well for them, but they force customers to go through their existing support systems, which are often slow, inefficient, off-shore, and have a first point of call who probably doesn't know much about the service they are meant to support.

Often the parent company don't know about back channels used by the original company to gather feedback to iterate effectively. Those aren't normally documented and are part of institutional memory and culture, gained over years of hard work.

Goodwill in the company then dives, and after 2-3 years (sometimes earlier) the original management team have a shell of the original company. Then they realise that their profit forecasts they originally promised to justify the takeover were hugely optimistic, and even the realistic forecast that in all probability would have been met had they not taken over the company won't be met due to the bloody awful decisions they have made.

At this point, they either: roll back their pointless or bad changes, bring in a new management team, or shutter the acquired company after strip mining the assets of their acquisition.

Rolling back the changes often leads to an even worse situation because now the original company has lost their momentum, lots of key people have left, they haven't been able to adapt as the market changes, and they have lost a huge amount of existing customer goodwill. Now the company must a. Fix the problems caused by the people who imposed it on them, b. Still play political games as people who were responsible for the awful decisions cover their arse and still have the ear of those in the parent company (which makes it harder to justify going back to the way things were), c. Explain to customers who have been put through turmoil (and who might be getting used to the albeit detrimental changes they have experienced) why they must now go through yet more changes as the company tries to put things back to the way they were, and d. They now have to justify their very existence, even though their momentum, talent, and direction were severely and adversely disrupted. Point d. is particularly damaging because they are still expected to meet the unrealistic earnings targets predicted by the original CEO, but often it's an impossible task.

Bringing in a new management team rarely works. Unless they are extremely good, then all the disruption of rolling back changes tends to happen, but now you have a new set of people who don't have a clear grasp of the business, and this time they don't even have the advantages of the original team (advise, goodwill, talent, etc) that the original management team had.

Eventually, if rolling back changes or bringing in a new management team don't work, then the original company gets shuttered anyway. If the acquiring company is lucky, the profits generated by the acquired company largely cover the costs of acquisition. But they lose enormous amounts of goodwill, both from those who are retrenched (ultimately for no good reason) and who might be potential customers or even competitors in the future, and from customers who were treated shoddily and who quite possibly see your company as a risk to deal with as they were left in the lurch and now need to spend time and resources finding an alternative product or service, with all its corresponding risks and implementation issues.

I can't see larger companies ceasing or even improving their acquisition processes any time soon. All I can say is that if you are a customer who uses a product or service from a company who is taken over or is part of a merger, start immediately planning on the best way to migrate from them should you need to so you mitigate your risk. And if you are an employee, by all means hold on for the ride, but be aware that the things you love about working for your company are quite likely to change or be entirely lost - and ultimately you may find you won't have a job. Dust off your resume, do not fight the system (that way madness lies), accept it's out of your control and take steps to handle disruption in your working life.

Agustus• 10 years ago

Where are the lessons learned from these integrations? We are currently 15 years into the dot com malaise and there does not seem to be good project managers or decision makers who recognize what they need requirements-wise and then what it will take to bring a person/team/company into the fold.

Hate him or love him, Zuckerberg has a team that integrates. Instagram was brought into the fold at Facebook and there has been little to no rumblings across the board from the users to the developers. WhatsApp has been left alone at Facebook and I still use it.

The integration teams exist, but the processes and/or politics are killing the integrations at a lot of companies.

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

Zuckerberg has a higher hit to miss ratio, it's true, but don't for one moment think that Facebook does a great job of acquiring smaller companies. You only have to look at Parse to see that even Facebook just can't seem to do it well.

yomly2• 10 years ago

Honestly, precisely how many tech takeovers really work?

I think YouTube and Instagram would like a word with you...

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

Instagram seems to have largely been left alone.

YouTube was left alone for done time, and very gradual changes seem to have been made. Even then there were issues.

But these are indeed success stories. That's two well known takeovers. But for every Instagram there are 5 Tumblrs.

paulcole• 10 years ago

"profitable, smaller organisation"

AFAIK, Tumblr was never close to profitable.

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

Obviously, that just makes a very bad situation much worse :-)

nashashmi2• 10 years ago

This reminds me of a trail of failing integrations. The lesson I derive is that it is much easier for a highly disciplined (and uncreative) organization like Microsoft to incorporate a technology/acquisition into their team, than it is for a highly creative undisciplined organization to incorporate the discipline and technology of its parent.

Case Study Example: AQuantive and HP Autonomy

at-fates-hands2• 10 years ago

"We were distributing Tumblr sponsored posts across Yahoo content in their native stream, but very few advertisers actually wanted it because it’s a different audience. And the content on Tumblr was very different from the content on Yahoo,"

Isn't this something fundamental to having one sales team? Knowing which ads should be run on each platform? Not sure you could miss something so huge and still expect the same or better results. This is a huge "WTF" moment for both properties.

josu2• 10 years ago

Not clickbait title:

"Yahoo is rolling back the decision to combine Tumblr’s sales team with Yahoo’s broader sales organization"

chris_wot8• 10 years ago

My understanding is that there is a preference in keeping the original source's title.

dang• 10 years ago

Except when it is misleading or linkbait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I'm not sure the OP was particularly baity, but we'll change the title to josu's suggestion.

Animats• 10 years ago

This is strange. They ran into trouble merging the sales organizations. Two product lines doesn't mean you need two sales organizations, even if they have different demographics and need different types of ads. Why sell the same customers twice?

Does Youtube have a separate sales organization from Google Ads?

NegatioN• 10 years ago

Your point has merit, but I would argue that YouTube has a much broader audience than tumblr. I assume this would make it easier to have a centralised sales team. (If they actually do)

Gratsby• 10 years ago

"She also named Tumblr as one of the three core platforms for Yahoo going forward, "

I thought Tumblr went the way of Friendster years and years ago. I find it hard to believe that their user base is getting any bigger aside from bots and spammers.

Yahoo rolls back decision to combine Tumblr’s sales team with Yahoo’s

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