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Yahoo! May! Buy! Tumblr! For! One! BEELLION! Bucks!

Hipster favourite could make Yahoo! cool again

Yahoo! has reportedly opened its chequebook, pencilled in nine zeroes with a one in front, and waved it around in the general direction of blogging site Tumblr.

Adweek says Yahoo! is willing to write the billion-dollar cheque because Tumblr is so cool it will excite advertisers.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Yahoo! officials as saying they're worried the venerable portal's audience is getting a bit grey. Tumblr's mobile-friendly, image-centric style is what all the cool kids are using these days, so buying it could give Yahoo! a way to make itself more relevant to the young.

Yahoo! has form acquiring user-generated content outfits: in 1999 it bought into dotcom boom valuation madness and shelled out $3.6bn for Geocities only to close it a decade later when, according to Wikipedia, it had 38 million pages.

Tumblr says it has over 100 million members, which makes it a steal at just a billion dollars, while also showing (as if we needed a reminder) just how nutty things were back in the late '90s and early noughties. ®

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