With a price tag of $1.1 billion, Tumblr Inc. ranks as Yahoo Inc.’s (Nasdaq:YHOO) fourth biggest acquisition, behind the $5.7 billion purchase of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999, the $3.6 billion transaction for Web-hosting pioneer Geocities, also in 1999, and the $1.6 billion deal for Overture in 2003. But New York blogging service Tumblr (which, coincidentally shares a backer with Geocities in Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson) is far from the only purchase Marissa Mayer has made since she left Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) to become CEO of Yahoo in July 2012. The once-struggling Yahoo has picked up 10 other companies over the past 10 months, including four in May.
As Mayer has told analysts, Yahoo’s primary strategy is to buy startups that cost in the tens of millions or low hundred millions. Many are considered “talent acquisitions,” meaning the point of the purchase is to gain the founder. (In the case of Tumblr, Mayer is keeping founder David Karp, pictured, a talented 26-year-old entrepreneur so passionate about the Internet that, as a teenager, he dropped out of high school to develop websites and never looked back.) Many of the targets specialize in mobile services, reflecting the trend of increasingly popular tablets and smartphones. Most of the deals are so small that they lack known price tags.
Mayer boasts plenty of experience with these types of deals. At Google, she made some 20 small purchases. Nevertheless, not every deal Mayer has pursued has panned out. France Telecom SA’s video site Dailymotion may be the one that got away. Talks between the two stalled in April reportedly.
While Mayer mulls her next move, here’s a look back at her M&A track record at Yahoo. (Note: Deals with undisclosed terms are in alphabetical order.)
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7. Propeld — Yahoo picked up this Seattle company in February. Propeld develops an application called Alike, a location discovery service.
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Yahoo is far from the only game in town, with competition for startups stemming from eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), Facebook, Google and others.
For more, see our ongoing coverage:
*Facebook Buys Mobile App Development Company Parse
*Smile. More Targets Follow Instagram Sale
*Strategic Buyer of the Year: eBay
And for previous stories on Yahoo’s recent buys, see:
*Yahoo Continues Startup Buying Spree
*Marissa Mayer's Debut Deal Goes Mobile