Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, has made her first big bet to jump-start growth at the stalled web portal company with the $1.1bn purchase of New York start-up Tumblr.
Announcing the deal on Monday, Yahoo said that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up”, Tumblr would be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp, Tumblr’s 26-year-old founder, will remain chief executive.
Tumblr, launched in 2007, has married short-form blogging with social media sharing to create a service that has been a hit with a mainly young online crowd. However, its growth rate has eased this year and the company has been slow to develop an effective form of advertising to match its lively content, according to internet analysts.
Ms Mayer, an early employee of Google who took over the reins at Yahoo last July, has won over Wall Street with her attempts to galvanise the company’s workers. However, she has not yet been able to rekindle growth or stem Yahoo’s relative decline on the web with the rise of Facebook and Google.
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