From $1 billion to $3 million in valuation – Tumblr tumbles big time!

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former chief executive of Yahoo had promised that she will not screw this property up.  But then she proceeded to do just that.  And spectacularly at that!  Yahoo had bought it for $1.1 bn in 2013.  Today it was sold to WordPress.com parent company for $3 million!  Many modest homes in Silicon Valley cost more.

At its apex, Tumblr had more users than both Instagram, now estimated to be worth close to $200 billion to parent Facebook , and Pinterest , which has a market cap of nearly $18 billion. In 2013, Tumblr sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. On Monday, the parent company of WordPress.com bought it for a pittance. (Source: Tumblr and the End of the Eyeballs-Are-Everything Era – WSJ)

One of the reasons for its decline was that once a community of open and free content was wrecked by Verizon when it removed the adult content.  In just the last year, the traffic fell by 40%!

One fails to understand how such utterly incompetent CEOs can even be considered “leaders”?  How can they keep making money despite being abject failures?!