Publishing Platforms are Cool Again
Tumblr is about to make Wordpress worth at least $5B.— Sean Percival (@Percival) May 19, 2013
As best reported by Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka with ATD, Yahoo is close to buying Tumblr for a cool $1.1B. No big deal.Actually it is a big deal because it seems publishing platforms are still sexy. It's also refreshing to see in an industry that has become so fixated on mobile or social platforms that catalog the minutiae of our lives. Of course Tumblr has a little of both. In this case however the power is in the platform and what it has yet to become.So what does that make platforms like Wordpress and Medium worth? $5b? $10B? One hundred million gizzilion dollars? Hard to say, but you can still pick up a Posterous on the cheap if you act fast. The service is closing down for good this month.Pub'n ain't easy but for some it's still extremely lucrative. For others it's a way to buy a massive younger cohort of prospective users.For large tech companies getting access to a fountain of youth doesn't come easy (or cheap apparently). Unfortunately history has not been so kind to those who have tried. Even poor Ponce de Leon tried to find the fountain once, only to end up in Florida. Let us hope Yahoo has better luck.
