I don't think tumblr is both too big to fail yet (although in a few years it will be if it can widen its audience, which is what I expect Yahoo will try and do. At the moment tumblr has a saturation of young users who have a tendency to abandon sites as they grow older - myspace and bebo are prime examples, as are lots of topical forums - but mature adult users tend to have greater longevity to their site loyalty) but it still has enough momentum to keep growing even with its current limited audience. If anything the buy-out will be good in the short-term because it gets tumblr mainstream media attention (to people who aren't up with what is hip and trendy online, tumblr is something they probably only heard of after yesterday). The only way it would fail would be if Yahoo tried excessively hard to aggressively monetise it by suffocating it with ads, forcing users to merge accounts (like Google did with YouTube) or making it a "pay directly" service. I don't think Yahoo would do that because they're not stupid, but big companies have done stupid things before. Consumers shouldn't worry - if Yahoo ruins it someone will set up a copycat site in no time (or there will be a mass exodus to Wordpress) and business will continue as usual.
How do you feel about Yahoo buying Tumblr?
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I don't use tumblr at all.
I don't think tumblr is both too big to fail yet (although in a few years it will be if it can widen its audience, which is what I expect Yahoo will try and do. At the moment tumblr has a saturation of young users who have a tendency to abandon sites as they grow older - myspace and bebo are prime examples, as are lots of topical forums - but mature adult users tend to have greater longevity to their site loyalty) but it still has enough momentum to keep growing even with its current limited audience. If anything the buy-out will be good in the short-term because it gets tumblr mainstream media attention (to people who aren't up with what is hip and trendy online, tumblr is something they probably only heard of after yesterday). The only way it would fail would be if Yahoo tried excessively hard to aggressively monetise it by suffocating it with ads, forcing users to merge accounts (like Google did with YouTube) or making it a "pay directly" service. I don't think Yahoo would do that because they're not stupid, but big companies have done stupid things before. Consumers shouldn't worry - if Yahoo ruins it someone will set up a copycat site in no time (or there will be a mass exodus to Wordpress) and business will continue as usual.