Breaking News: Yahoo to acquire Tumblr in $1.1 billion cash

 by Isi Esene

The Yahoo board has approved about $1.1 billion deal to acquire the blogging site, Tumblr.

The approval was said to have been given through a unanimous vote of the members of the board.

According to reports, there were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based hipster blogging service.

Read the Business Inside report below:

    Marissa Mayer has made her first big move as CEO of Yahoo. She’s buying a social networking site with a younger audience, and a ton of pageviews. Now it’s time to monetize the thing.

    Tumblr has just $13 million in revenue right now. It should be able to increase that revenue following the model of Twitter and Facebook.

    People who use Tumblr follow other Tumblrs through a “Dashboard.” This works like Twitter or Facebook with other Tumblr blog posts flowing through a timeline. Presumably, Tumblr can start inserting ads between users posts like Twitter inserts sponsored posts.

    Tumblr has raised $125 million in funding. It’s last round of funding reportedly valued the company at $800 million. It was looking for more funding when Yahoo stepped in.

    Reports on the deal say that Tumblr’s 26-year-old CEO David Karp will be able to operate fairly autonomously. Karp will be locked into a four-year deal to stay at Tumblr, All Things D reported. That should assuage the fears of any Tumblr users about how things could change (for the worse) under Yahoo.