Yahoo!!! Tumblr Acquired Under Design + Community Focused Marissa Mayer

Guess who made this panic graphic...not the Tumblr/Yahoo haters, but Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer. For her Tumblr blog. Which she named marissamayr.tumblr.com - misspelling her last name by dropping the "e" in keeping with Tumblr and Yahoo owned Flickr.

Despite the acquisition haters out there, I'm actually a little giddy about the prospects!

Early Thursday morning, a day after the acquisition, Sabina sent me a PR Lead from a reporter doing a story on the Yahoo/Tumblr merger who was seeking comments on why Tumblr users were apparently flocking to WordPress after the acquisition was announced. I didn't know, so did a little Googling to get acclimated with the drama, and found that generally, it was the usual brouhaha that happens after change, with people freaking out, thinking Yahoo would be uncool for uber-cool Tumblr, force ads on them, or even shut Tumblr down.

Which wasn't helped by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in a Sunday evening blog post, where he claimed that many Tumblr users are jumping ship to his blogging platform to avoid dealing with Yahoo (note, I think Matt has changed his blog post because those words are gone from his post that PC Mag links to, and I do remember reading the original post...hmm....):

"'[Tumblr] imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it's Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000," Mullenweg wrote.'"

Silliness! Did they not read Marissa Mayer's announcement on her new Tumblr page, that had glowing reviews for the Tumblr community, and its creator? She says:

I've been a blogger since 2005, authoring numerous blogs housed on Blogger, rival blogging platform to Tumblr and WordPress. I'm  considering moving Tin Shingle's blog from Drupal's CMS to Blogger for a variety of reasons, namely SEO and ease of use, which are areas that Tumblr blogs lag in. Until possibly now.

Thanks to the merger, Tumblr bloggers stand a chance at looking at real improvement at the under the hood coding structure of their blogs, so that they "speak Yahoo search" better, and stand a better chance of ranking highly in search results. If a search engine is behind a blogging platform, then you know that the search engine really wants that content to be found. Not that a search engine would build anything sneaky for the blog platform to rank extra high and cut in line, but you know that they'd build a basic blog template that "speaks search" *really well*. Complaints about Tumblr used to be that good SEO was fundamentally hard to tweak with Tumblr templates. Improvements have since been made, and perhaps many more are possible. But it still has oddities, like how blog titles sometimes aren't available (like at Marissa's blog), or if they are in the blog, they aren't linked to anything, but the date is linked to the post. Just odd things that aren't intuitive to the user experience.

Another point: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has an eye for design, as does Tumblr. Design is half the reason why Tumblr blogs took off, especially in the fashion industry. It's actually cool to have a Tumblr blog, despite its technical setbacks and SEO challenges. If that code under the hood gets greased up a bit, Tumblr could really take off with content heavy-weights who *do* want more page clicks for their Google or Yahoo ads, and other sponsorships.

Another reason Tumblr bloggers should be shouting "Yahoo!!" is that Tumblr is community based, and so is Marissa Mayer. Building a community following on Tumblr is quite easy with built in features, so that's a step ahead of the curve with Blogger blogs that Google is trying to build into their templates right now by introducing tagging features for Google+.

Note: Marissa has since dropped Google+ from her Twitter bio. This really turns up the heat! ;)   (thanks Charles Arthur at The Guardian for pointing this out!)

Despite Yahoo's habit of shutting down its acquisitions, like Del.icio.us, Geocities and Broadcast.com, its move to buy a popular blogging platform is taken from the same page as when Google bought the blogging platform Blogger a decade ago in 2003, which proved to be lucrative when Google made it even easier for blog publishers to place Google Ads in their blog in a way that mirrored the blog's voice. And where was Marissa at that time...? At Google. :)

Marissa states her intentions in her blog post announcement:

I'm looking forward to the changes, as they stand a chance of being very beneficial to bloggers and brands using the Tumblr platform. Personally, I'd never considered using Tumblr, but now am giving it second thoughts, purely for the prospective benefits of search and community reach.

Do/did you blog on Tumblr? Comment below on your experience with using  it, and if you were happy with it for your brand.