Verizon is trying to sell Tumblr, the blogging site once worth $1.1 billion (VZ)

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Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg

  • Verizon Communications is looking to sell Tumblr, according to the Wall Street Journal.
  • The process is on-going and it’s unclear whether the company will find a buyer, according to the report.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Verizon Communications is looking to sell Tumblr, the free blogging platform it acquired when it bought Yahoo in 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The process is still on-going, and it’s unclear whether it will result in a sale or what price Verizon is hoping to get for the web site, according to the report which cites anonymous sources.

Any deal is unlikely to be for a price anywhere near the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for Tumblr back in 2013. Yahoo wrote down the website’s value by $230 million three years later, and Tumblr’s popularity has faded in recent years. Tumblr founder David Karp left in 2017, when Tumblr was subsumed by Verizon with the acquisition of Yahoo.

The sale process comes as Verizon Media Group looks to cut costs and improve its finances related to properties formerly under the Oath banner that combined Yahoo and AOL. The group laid off 7% of its workforce in January, including employees at the media websites HuffPo and TechCrunch. Those cuts impacted 750 employees.

At the end of 2018, Verizon said it would write down the value of that business by $4.6 billion.

Tumblr was founded in 2007 and grew in popularity when microblogging was a popular trend on the internet. The platform currently has 465.4 million blogs and 21.6 million daily posts.

Tumblr took a major hit in the first quarter of the year after it banned Not Safe For Work content from its platform. Its daily visitors dropped by 30% between December 2018 and March 2019, according to the Verge.

Verizon did not immediately return a request for comment.

SEE ALSO: Yahoo spent $1 billion to buy Tumblr, but now it’s hinting it may write off nearly the entire deal

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