The streaming business is one of the most profitable in recent years. Private television channels have taken advantage of this, producing exclusive content that can only be seen under subscription. Seen with perspective, acquiring a streaming platform at the right time would have been a great business opportunity. Especially in the case of Netflix, the first platform to exploit this market, which still leads today. Yahoo!, a fellow pioneer in the internet business, had the chance to do it and it didn’t. And it’s a decision that haunts the company’s former CEO, Marissa Mayer.
In an interview with Tech Brew, Meyer revealed that Yahoo! was considering the possibility of acquiring Hulu or Netflix. He was also contemplating buying Tumblr. The year was 2013. At that time, the streaming platform founded by Reed Hastings was valued at $4 billion, while the Walt Disney-owned video-on-demand subscription service was valued at $1.3 billion. But Yahoo opted for the Tumblr social network, which it bought for $1.1 billion. A huge mistake.
This is how Meyer admitted in the interview: “We were looking for a transformational acquisition and we bought Tumblr. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4 billion and Hulu was $1.3 billion at the time. And any of those, in retrospect, would have been a better acquisition.”
Just 2 years after the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo backed out. They could not find the key to monetize the social network and in 2015 they decided to sell the platform. Just two years later, in 2017, Yahoo! it was absorbed by Verizon. By then, the value of the social network had been reduced in a very significant way. In 2019, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic, the company that owns and operates the online publishing platform WordPress, for an estimated $3 million.
In parallel, Yahoo! tried to launch his own streaming platform, Yahoo Screen. The initiative was a failure: they closed the same 2016.
Currently the value of Netflix exceeds 143,500 million dollars. So, figures in hand, if Yahoo had made the purchase, it would have made a great decision. For its part, Hulu remains the majority property of Disney. However, its future is somewhat uncertain, because Disney CEO Bob Iger recently said that the company is examining whether it will seek to buy Comcast’s 33% stake in Hulu or sell or spin off the streaming service.
“We’re really looking at the business very, very carefully,” he said. “The environment is very, very complicated right now and before we make any major decisions about our level of investment, our commitment to that business, we want to understand where it might go.” go,” he concluded.
