Yahoo!/Tumblr: combining UGC and social networking is where the action is

Yahoo! is acquiring Tumblr. The specs:

• 117m users (growing 120k per day), 108m blogs, 300m monthly active visitors
• 75m posts per day, total 51bn
• Raised $125m
• 2012 revenues $13m
• 175 employees
• Combining with Tumblr will grow Yahoo!'s audience by 50% to 1bn and traffic by 20%.

Tumblr is a combination of user-generated content (UGC) and social networking, like Instagram (Facebook), and in a sense comparable to Pinterest (pictures), Waze (social mapping & traffic info, going to Facebook). Flickr (Yahoo!) could expand its social functions as well, as could YouTube (Google).

Pulse went to LinkedIn and Yammer to Microsoft. Other obvious takeover candidates are those that in a way combine UGC and social networking:

• Pinterest (pictures)
• PhotoRocket (photos)
• SlideRocket, SlideShare (presentations)
• Evernote (notes)
• SoundCloud (music, audio files)
• WordPress (blogs)
• Quora (Q&A)
• Path (mobile social net)
• Dropbox and Box.net (storage)
• Twitter (text-based microblogging)