Tumblr: From a $1.1 Billion Yahoo Buyout to a $3 Million Fire Sale

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In 2007, David Karp and Marco Arment built Tumblr in a two-week gap between consulting contracts, and it gained 75,000 users in two weeks. By 2011, half its users were under 25. With no public follower counts and a tag field that people filled with rambling private commentary, it became a haven for niche communities, especially LGBTQ youth. In May 2013, Yahoo bought it for 1.1 billion dollars in cash. Six years later it sold for less than 3 million.

This episode traces how that value vanished. Yahoo bought an audience that mocked advertising and wrote down 712 million dollars by 2016. Verizon inherited the site in 2017 and, after Apple pulled the app from its store in late 2018, banned all adult content and handed enforcement to a crude algorithm. Traffic collapsed, Automattic picked up the remains in 2019, and the platform now loses 30 million dollars a year while its archive is sold as training data.

Nearly 170,000 people signed a petition against the Yahoo sale, and users reblogged sponsored posts with sarcastic tags until the campaigns became jokes.
The automated filter looked for skin tones and curves, so it flagged raw chicken, sand dunes, and a line drawing of a vomiting unicorn while real violations slipped through.
By March 2019, Tumblr had lost an estimated 30 percent of its traffic.
A 2022 settlement with the New York City Commission on Human Rights found the filter had disproportionately hit LGBTQ users and required algorithmic reviews.
With more than half a billion blogs and roughly 172 billion posts, Tumblr began opting users into data sales to AI companies including Midjourney and OpenAI.

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