Yahoo should have bought Netflix or Hulu instead of Tumblr. That’s the wisdom-in-hindsight opinion of former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who offered her thoughts on the 2013 acquisition in a recent interview.
As Mayer told a Tech Brew reporter: “We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4 billion and Hulu was at $1.3 billion at the time. And either of those, with hindsight being 20/20, would have been a better acquisition.”
The company had launched its own streaming service called Yahoo Screen but closed it in 2016 when it did not meet fiscal expectations.
In seeking that so-called “transformative acquisition,” Yahoo was banking on the hope that Tumblr would facilitate its launch into the social mediasphere, but things quickly tumbled when the company was unable to figure out a way to monetize Tumblr’s user base. After Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017, it sold Tumblr two years later to Automattic, which owns the WordPress publishing platform. Yahoo itself is now the property of Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm.
Hulu was also among the other properties that Yahoo considered buying during Mayer’s regime. In 2013, Hulu’s owners (Disney, Comcast, and 21st Century Fox) were considering auctioning it off, and Yahoo was among the bidders until the owners changed their minds. Today, Disney owns a majority share in Hulu but it’s considering spinning it off. In March, Disney’s CEO called Hulu a “solid platform” while conceding that that “the environment is very, very tricky right now and before we make any big decisions about our level of investment, our commitment to that business, we want to understand where it could go.”
Marissa Mayer also told the Tech Brew interviewer that one of her regrets was hiring Henrique de Castro as chief operating officer of Yahoo. She eventually sacked him after little more than a year on the job. After leaving Yahoo, Mayer cofounded an AI-oriented startup known as Sunshine.
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Yahoo’s Ex-CEO Marissa Mayer Regrets Not Buying Netflix and Acquired Tumblr Instead
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