The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo’s board has approved a $1.1 billion cash deal to buy the blogging site Tumblr, and the company will still be run independently as a business.
David Karp, Chief Excutive of the company, founded Tumblr in 2007 while in a bedroom of his mother’s apartment. The site makes it easy to share content with the world by starting up a blog in less then a few minutes. Early on the site had 75,000 users, but today has around 100 million blogs. The site is also used for social communication.
Larger companies have bought smaller startups in the past, only to see the union fail. Yahoo was known for its purchases of Geocities in 1999, which was a collection of communities that created sites. In 2009, Yahoo closed down Geocities, as they never got their money’s worth on the deal. Hopefully Yahoo does not ruin what makes Tumblr great.
