SUNNYVALE (CBS SF) – Tumblr, a blogging service that was sold to Yahoo in a billion-dollar deal six years ago, was sold again reportedly at a fraction of its onetime value.
Verizon, which acquired Sunnyvale-based Yahoo’s assets in 2017, sold Tumblr on Monday to Automattic, the parent company of the WordPress blogging platform. According to Axios, the sale price was around $3 million, less than one percent of what Yahoo paid.
It did not take long for observers of Silicon Valley’s expensive real estate market to notice that the sale price of the onetime social media darling was comparable to buying a modest-looking home in some of the area’s priciest neighborhoods.
So for perspective, if Tumblr really was sold for less than $3M, that's about the price of a 2 or 3 bedroom home in Silicon Valley pic.twitter.com/BbFiDcG1bC
— Ben Smith (@benasmith) August 13, 2019
In Silicon Valley, $3 million will get you Tumblr or this modest three bedroom family house. pic.twitter.com/uRa6PRbrD5
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 12, 2019
If you need to understand Silicon Valley, this house in Los Altos is worth more than what Tumblr just sold for pic.twitter.com/IxUANhBLog
— Andrew Shvarts (@Shvartacus) August 13, 2019
A check of Zillow on Tuesday morning found nearly three dozen homes for sale in Palo Alto that were listed above $3 million, another 30 homes in nearby Los Altos, and yet another 30 homes in Saratoga above that price point. In Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, there were five homes listed at $3 million and up.
Five of the 10 most expensive zip codes in the country are located in Silicon Valley, according to an analysis from real estate website PropertyShark, including Atherton, which had the highest median sale price on the list at $6.7 million.
After being purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013, Tumblr has struggled to compete with other social media platforms, such as Reddit and Facebook, according to CNET. Last November, the site was dealt a setback when its mobile app disappeared after child pornography slipped through content filters. The following month, Tumblr’s crackdown on adult content led to a 17 percent decline in desktop and mobile page views.
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