Tumblr
Bought for $1.1 billion. Reportedly sold for under $3 million.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Not dead. Just marked down 99.7%.
Reblogs, Yahoo's Money, One Catastrophic Policy
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Tumblr is alive, in the way a house is alive after the fire. Yahoo paid $1.1 billion in cash for it in 2013. Three years later Yahoo wrote down $712 million of that. In December 2018 Tumblr banned adult content, which turned out to be the content. In 2019 Verizon sold it to Automattic for what Axios reported was less than $3 million. That is a 99.7% discount on a platform with 465 million blogs. In 2023 its CEO said it was losing $30 million a year. It once hosted Barack Obama and a user who allegedly collected human bones from a graveyard. Range was never the problem.