Andre Yoskowitz
3 Feb 2016 20:57
Yahoo has written down the value of Tumblr by $230 million, yet another misfire by CEO Marissa Mayer.
The company purchased Tumblr for about $1 billion in cash in 2013, despite the fact that it made no money and usership had grown relatively stagnant.
Overall, Yahoo took a $4.5 billion goodwill impairment, writing down nearly every division in the company,
When Mayer acquired the company, she projected Yahoo's user base would jump to 1 billion within weeks, but it actually ended up taking around 18 months until Yahoo announced they had hit the milestone. That number, however, is questionable. Yahoo began using a new "undisclosed metric" to calculate its user base. Traditional research firms, like comScore, still have Yahoo well below the billion mark.
Mayer also estimated that Tumblr would bring in $100 million in revenue for 2015, but that didn't happen either. "In 2015, we experienced a slower ramp in monetization than we initially expected, and coupled with the sales realignment, the business didn't deliver that $100 million revenue goal for the year," Mayer noted.
Source:
WSJ