Jakarta –
Former CEO Yahoo Marissa Mayer admitted that he had one regret while leading the company, namely not acquiring Netflix and instead acquiring Tumblr.
He said this when he was interviewed by Tech Brew. According to him, the costs to acquire Netflix are indeed much higher than Tumblr, but the prospects are much better.
For information, Yahoo spent USD 1.1 billion when it acquired Tumblr in 2013. At that time, Netflix’s valuation was still around USD 4 billion, or four times that of Tumblr. As of May 2023, Netflix’s capitalization is estimated at USD 143.5 billion.
“We were looking at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr. At the same time, we were actually considering the possibility of buying Hulu, or ironically, Netflix. And as I recall, Netflix was $4 billion and Hulu was $1.3 billion. Both would be a better acquisition.
After Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo in 2013, the network found it difficult to compete with other social media platforms. Some of the steps that Yahoo tried on Tumblr were advertising and setting up unreasonable ad sales targets. Finally in 2016, Yahoo just reduced the price of Tumblr to USD 230 million.
Things continued to get worse after Yahoo was acquired by Verizon, especially after Tumblr was involved in a child pornography case in 2018, which led to its removal from the Apple App Store.
Tumblr also immediately tightened the rules for pornographic content, which made it increasingly abandoned by users. User traffic dropped by nearly 30%, and eventually Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress owners for less than USD 3 million.
In fact, Netflix’s fate may not be as successful as it is now if it had been acquired by Yahoo. But the possibility of failure will be smaller than Tumblr, as quoted by detikINET from The Verge, Tuesday (9/5/2023).
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(asj/fay)
2023-05-09 15:11:09
#Yahoo #Boss #Regrets #Acquired #Netflix
