Huge Valuation’s Lead to Huge Losses…Again.

A ghost of unicorns past ominously re-surfaced yesterday evening. 

Verizon agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, for less than $3 million, according to Axios. It’s crazy to think that Yahoo paid $1.1 billion in 2013 to acquire the social media network. When it announced the acquisition, then-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, “As we promised this morning, we are not going to screw this up.”

By early 2016, Yahoo had written down Tumblr’s value by $230 million, and by 2017, all of Yahoo was sold to Verizon for just $4.48 billion.