Yahoo’s Big Day: Buys Tumblr and offers 1 TB space with Flickr

Yahoo has just capped off a very significant day for themselves. Firstly they have announced the acquisition of the blogging platform Tumblr. In the second announcement, Flickr has now rolled out 1 Terabyte free storage for all users. This is a big deal for Yahoo which has recently struggled to keep its users and more importantly find new users.

The Tumblr Acquisition

Yahoo has bought Tumblr for a estimated $1.1 Billion. That is a lot more money than say Facebook shelled out for Instagram. So what does Yahoo gain from Tumblr?

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• Tumblr has 300 million unique visitors on it and has over 900 posts published every second.
• The Yahoo+ Tumblr deal will grow traffic by 20% and its audience will go up by 50%. This increases the advertising opportunities.
• Mobile seems to be a focus for Yahoo with Tumblr’s acquisition.
• Yahoo’s CEO in her own Tumblr blog announced that Tumblr will be treated as an independent entity and their CEO David Karp will remain. More importantly in her own words she assuaged the feelings of Tumblr’s community with the quote “We promise not to screw it up”.

Flickr gets 1 TB free space

Flickr is still very popular and its not surprising Yahoo chose to make big announcements with it.

• Flickr users get 1 TB storage space free. That means if you upload 6.5 Megapixel photo on Flickr, you can upload half a million of them and for free.
• The big storage size means Flickr now remain relevant as a storage option especially with the rise of backup options from Google and Apple.
• Pro Flickr account users will continue to get unlimited storage space and have stats show up for visits on their photos. But new users cannot signup for Pro accounts. That basically means Flickr Pro is more or less going away in time.

Flickr might have rebooted with huge storage space but it will be interesting to see how it manages to complete with the likes of say Google+ which offers to store photos from a phone directly to the cloud. This helps freeing up space on the phone without worrying about losing any photos.

What are your views on Yahoo’s big announcements today? Do drop in your comments.