In a bipartisan vote reached on Thursday evening, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that aims to radically overhaul much of current U.S. immigration policy, which could ultimately increase the number of highly skilled tech industry workers allowed visas to work inside of the U.S.

The bill, which passed through the committee by a vote of 13 to five, is now headed to the floor for debate, where it is expected to be deliberated upon through the summer.

It is, in particular, the first small victory for FWD.us, the political action group formed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and supported by a cadre of such tech industry luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and famed venture capitalist John Doerr.

To be sure, Zuckerberg’s group is far from the only lobbyist group aiming for immigration policy reform in Washington, nor should it be solely credited for swaying the final decision. But in Silicon Valley at the moment, it is perhaps the most visible.

“With its 13-5 vote to support comprehensive immigration reform, the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken another crucial step forward to growing a knowledge economy,” Joe Green, FWD.us founder and president, said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This comprehensive bipartisan legislation contains the key principles we support, and its passage is another important step in the right direction.”

“It’s clear that the momentum continues to build in favor of commonsense immigration legislation — and FWD.us will continue to advocate for comprehensive, bipartisan reform that will attract innovators, build prosperous neighborhoods with strong families and good jobs, and ensure the U.S. continues to lead the world in the growth of the knowledge economy,” Green said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In a grand mission statement published on the editorial page of the Washington Post when FWD.us launched, Zuckerberg reasoned that the need for his group was to create change in areas like education, long-term economic issues and, most of all, immigration issues.

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Post article. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

Since launching the group in April, FWD.us has spent its money lobbying aggressively for immigration reform in particular, backing lawmakers who have expressed support for changes in the current legislation.

Though not all of FWD.us’s supporters were comfortable with the group’s lobbying tactics. After it came out earlier this month that FWD.us had bankrolled ads for immigration-reform-friendly legislators who also supported controversial environmental policies like Arctic oil drilling and the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, FWD.us lost two high-profile supporters; Tesla CEO and green energy proponent Elon Musk withdrew support, along with Yammer founder David Sacks.

The immigration policy changes FWD.us is pushing for in particular would ultimately benefit many high-tech companies who want better access to recruiting foreign engineering talent, much of which is currently restricted by the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign workers on an annual basis.

“This is about jobs. Period,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told AllThingsD in a statement. “A highly skilled workforce helps Internet companies grow here at home and hire more Americans. For each worker an Internet company hires under an H1-B visa program, they are able to bring on as many as 12 American workers. … This is a win for the knowledge economy and we look forward to this process moving forward.”

The legislation was held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee until Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) agreed with dissenting members of the committee to hold off on adding an amendment to the bill which would have allowed certain provisions for gay couples.

Sen. Leahy told the New York Times that he withheld his amendment “with a heavy heart.”

The efforts of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Uah) in particular were instrumental in including a last-minute amendment that would benefit the tech industry. His amendment, which the Times said was agreed upon late in the deliberations, would increase the minimum number of high-tech H1-B visas allowed annually.

The office of Sen. Hatch did not immediately respond to a telephone request for comment.

“Thanks to the leadership of Chairman Leahy and a bipartisan group of eight Senators, the legislation that passed the Judiciary Committee with a strong bipartisan vote is largely consistent with the principles of commonsense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system,” President Barack Obama said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening.

Flickr/Ei Katsumata

Most of those claims have been anecdotal. The most prevalent voice came from Josh Miller — co-founder of competing social startup Branch — whose argument hinged mostly around the behavioral habits of his teenage sister. Despite a lack of hard evidence, this somehow reinforced just how passe Facebook supposedly is.

Alas, as of Tuesday, we now have a study to bolster the claims. Teens are expressing “waning enthusiasm” for Facebook, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center. Teens, according to the study, are tired of all the “drama,” the stress of managing their online reputation on the network, and are “annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details.”

Contrast that waning enthusiasm with an increase in teen Twitter signups over the past two years. Nearly a quarter of online teens use the microblogging service, according to the study. Fascinating, considering the “inane details” Facebook complaint; it wasn’t so long ago that many dismissed Twitter as “the service for letting people know what you had for breakfast.”

As the report states, teens took some time to warm up to Twitter, a service that was first colonized by adults. Today, however, “teens are now migrating to Twitter in growing numbers, often as a supplement to their Facebook use.”

It’s worth noting that while Twitter may be increasing in popularity with the kids, it’s not necessarily at the expense of Facebook in terms of user activity (at least, not yet).

Indeed, the teens queried in the study aren’t leaving Facebook. Rather, they feel burdened by it, a necessity of existing online in the 21st century. “While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives,” the report stated, “it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.”

Perhaps that’s why Facebook Home — the fully Facebook-ed version of an Android phone — doesn’t seem to be taking off. Or maybe that’s why Poke — Facebook’s Snapchat clone aimed squarely at the teen audience– was dead in the water just weeks after launch. Perhaps, at least with teens, Facebook isn’t desirable as every part of our connected experience, but rather as relegated to one part of it: Our identity.

Which, admittedly, isn’t the end of the world for the social giant. Facebook wants to be an online directory of people, making it possible to look up profiles as you would thumb through a phone book of yesteryear. And with Facebook Connect, you can take that online identity across the Web to sign in to any number of commenting systems, applications and partner sites.

Still, losing mindshare and desirability from the young audience today isn’t good for the long term. Today’s kids will be tomorrow’s adults, folks with jobs and a willingness to buy the things they see in the Facebook ads served to them.

Teen or not, Facebook wants you to be delighted to visit its site, not obligated. Perhaps the company can spur that feeling in teens again someday — drama not included.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata

Alas, the answer isn’t cut-and-dried.

When Yahoo announced its $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr yesterday, it said David Karp’s blogging platform had more than 300 million monthly unique visitors.*

But that’s not the same as a “user” number, at least not in the way that modern-day social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook talk about user numbers.

When those guys talk about about users, they’re generally talking about “active users” — people who have created accounts on their networks, and are using those accounts to access the services’ core functions.

And if you’re trying to assess Tumblr’s business prospects, that would be a good number to know. Because, at least for now, the company’s ad strategy revolves around showing ads to registered users who use the service’s core “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s news feeds.

Tumblr doesn’t seem to provide an equivalent number. So, unless they offer one up,** we’ll have to take educated guesses.

I’ve started out by asking someone who knows the company pretty well; that person guesstimates that the total number of monthly users who will see a Tumblr dashboard is at least a third of the company’s 110 million registered user base, and maybe quite a bit higher: “My guess is 30 million to 50 million.”

That number would sound a lot less impressive in the first paragraph of a press release, so it’s understandable that Yahoo would go with 300 million instead. And it’s important to note that Yahoo has already said it may start showing ads beyond the dashboard.

Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on their own pages. You wouldn’t need to be logged in to see those.

If Yahoo did that, and Tumblr users tolerated it, that would certainly expand the company’s revenue stream beyond its active user numbers. Then again, there are a lot of Tumblr pages that are never going to have an ad on them, because porn and other topics aren’t “brand safe.”

Meanwhile, if anyone else wants to take a guess at the number of registered, dashboard-viewing users, be my guest. You can sound off in comments below, or reach me via email (peter@allthingsd.com).

* That number is much bigger than the 117 million estimate comScore provides, but gaps between internal and external Web measurements are as old as Yahoo. By the way: In an ad sales pitch obtained by Business Insider, Tumblr said it had 225 million uniques as of March. That’s a big growth spurt!

** I’ve asked Tumblr’s rep for that info, but I’m still waiting for her to reply to the email I sent her last Thursday. Busy few days, I guess. [UPDATE: Tumblr's rep replied! And no, they're still not providing an active user number. On with the guesses!]

The $15 million round comes primarily from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam’s philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network.

Change.org CEO Ben Rattray

Omidyar Network is taking a minority and non-controlling stake with the explicit disavowal of a future payday from a sale or IPO, two things Change.org has promised it will never do. Other investors in the round include a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund called Uprising.

Though Change.org may sound like a nonprofit, it is actually a for-profit, mission-driven company that is certified as a B corporation.

Said Change.org CEO Ben Rattray of that perceived divide, “There’s this latent uncertainty about whether it’s possible to build a company focused on a mission, and we’re proving it’s possible. It’s not an open question, it’s pretty clear that we’re having substantial impact. People have a binary perspective of an organization. It’s an impoverished perspective of the possibilty of business to change the world.”

Rattray said he had first courted the Omidyars for investment when he started Change.org, so it was a deal nearly seven years in the making.

Change.org had $15 million in revenue last year based on its sponsored petitions, where organizations can pay to get their causes in front of users in the hope of securing their signatures and email addresses. It currently has 170 employees in 18 countries, and is spending much of its available resources on expanding around the world.

“We’re no longer trying to find product market fit; we’re scaling the organization,” Rattray said. “And it became clear as we started to scale the site to support hundreds of millions of users that funding would be immensely useful in building out an engineering organization.”

Rattray said he still often finds himself combating the perception that signing a petition is a form of lazy “clicktivism” rather than valid activism.

“People oftentimes criticize petitions as being too easy. They think clicktivism is a bug rather than a feature,” he said. “But the goal isn’t to make social change difficult, it’s to make it effective. If we enable at greater scale and greater participation than ever before, we think that’s actually a good thing.”

As Quora’s co-founder, CEO and also a significant investor, Adam D’Angelo is the driving force behind the site as it expands from Q&A to other kinds of writing. In an interview last week at the company’s new Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, the former Facebook CTO downplayed concerns about the revenue-free Quora growing too slowly, saying he believes he can outlast the faddish companies that come and go by building a high-quality product.

Why harp on growth? Despite D’Angelo’s roots at Facebook, where the -illions of users now start with a “b,” four-year-old Quora had just 2.9 million global unique visitors in April, up from 2.6 million the year before, according to comScore. But comScore doesn’t count mobile traffic, which D’Angelo said now amounts to a third of Quora usage.

Here’s an edited and condensed write-up of the chat:

Liz Gannes: How would you describe where Quora as a company is now?

Adam D’Angelo: We’re about 50 people, and a year ago we were a third of that. We moved to Mountain View. All these startups grew up in Palo Alto — there’s us, there was Flipboard, there was Pinterest, there was Pulse, and most of the other ones went to the city, but we ended up as the only of those startup down here that’s hiring, so it’s been really good for recruiting because it’s different. We’ve become more data-driven. When you’re small, you have to do everything on intuition, but now we’re at the scale where we have a lot of users, so we can run experiments. We have a data team that’s pretty big, actually.

What do you use the data for — is it personalization?

No, it’s more about to make decisions about what to build. We’re looking at whether something’s going to be a good investment of resources. When you’re small, you can say, “I use the product myself, and I’m annoyed by these things, so let’s change this.” Now we can say, “Twenty percent of our users have encountered this issue that makes them less engaged or more engaged,” so we can test it. That’s really important, because then you don’t have to centralize the decision making. So it doesn’t all go through me.

How big is Quora? What are the most important metrics to you — volume of content, how many people use it?

We look at people who use it. We don’t share the particular numbers, but it’s pretty big, and it’s growing.

But are you happy with how big it is? There’s a perception that Quora is not as huge as it could be, or as people hoped it would be.

I’m happy with how big it is now, given it’s now, but I want it to be more in the future. I wouldn’t be happy it if stayed where it is now.

So you’re saying you like growth. Okay. It seems — and I speak as someone who has been using Quora for a while — that you guys have a bunch of growth initiatives, various things you’re trying to get people to log in more, in a way that looks like you’re trying to goose growth. But maybe people just want to read content without logging in, and that’s okay.

It comes back to the data stuff. When we get people to log in, they end up using Quora a lot more, and we can provide a lot better experience for them. We can show them a personalized news feed, we can send them digest emails, and do all this ranking to find some stuff they want to read. There’s a vocal minority that doesn’t want to log in, but most people just log in and have a better experience, long-term. We’re not trying to goose anything. It’s not like we’re about to raise money, and we’re not about to sell the company, so there’s no reason why we would be doing that unless we thought it would be better long-term.

How do you think about the long-term value of content itself? Quora seems to be all about the evergreen content, but isn’t there value in near-term, real-time discussions like what goes on over at Reddit or Twitter?

Compared to other products, we’re much more long-term. Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it’s the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it’s only a year, but not like a tweet, where it’s only relevant for a day or a week. On Quora, it takes time for the content to accumulate, but it just builds and builds. That means growth goes a little bit slower than something like Twitter or these viral apps, but I also think it means we have higher long-term value that we’re going to reach.

You’ve introduced a bunch of new content types in addition to Q&A. What’s working?

So we have answers, blogs and now we have reviews. The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.

How do people find things on Quora? What’s the balance between search and social and topics?

I think it’s a third, a third, a third. Search is bigger than you think.

Really? But I don’t even know what to look for on Quora.

It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack like on Google, it’s finding a broad area. It’s probably most useful when you want to do something like visit a new place.

You reformulated the Quora core mission recently. Tell me about that.

Our new mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It’s what we always thought we were doing, but it’s a different way to say it.

If you were to say, Quora is a fill-in-the-blank service, what would it be?

That’s different from the mission; that’s positioning. I would say it’s a “knowledge-sharing” service.

How is Quora different from other companies?

We’re data-driven. We really value execution and getting things done. We do things more frequently than other companies; we have a faster cadence.

Everybody says that.

Everyone says that, but I think it’s not as true. We release code 40 times per day. And we have this thing where code, eight minutes after someone finishes writing it, is live on the site.

Also, I think we’re more focused on the mission, and people at Quora care about making an impact on the world. At a lot of other companies people are trying to make money in a short amount of time; this is their one hop in their Silicon Valley career before they go to the next thing. We talk to people before they join, and say, “We’re not acquisition-focused; you should only come work here if you’re willing to stick with it for a long time.”

What if Quora weren’t working? Hypothetically, how would you know when to quit?

I have a view that things don’t really decline for no reason. Other companies, when that’s happened, it’s because the users didn’t really like the product. Or that they were gaming Facebook, and Facebook shut them down and finally it caught up to them. I don’t think we’re doing any of this gaming stuff. Or maybe if there were competition, but I don’t think there’s competition for what we’re doing.

I have a view that if you build something that’s good, and you keep making it better, it lasts. A lot of times, companies will make these major changes that make things worse and that will lead to a decline. So if that were the case, we’d figure out what was happening and we would revert it.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News

Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr. How’s it going to make its money back?

A bunch of ways, Marissa Mayer explained on a conference call today. But if you’re a Tumblr user who was hoping that those ways didn’t involve putting more ads on your free blogging service, well … don’t read on.

Still reading? Okay! So: Don’t be surprised when you see more ads on your dashboard, and/or some of the Tumblrs you visit.

First, the stakes: Yahoo said it doesn’t expect Tumblr to generate meaningful money for the Web giant this year. But next year, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman said, “we do expect this to enhance EBITDA and revenue.” And prior to the Tumblr deal, J.P. Morgan estimated that Yahoo would generate $1.7 in EBITDA on $4.65 billion in revenue in 2014.

In other words: It takes a lot of money to move Yahoo’s needle. And Yahoo thinks Tumblr — which generated all of $13 million last year — will do that within the next 20 months.

On to the ads: Yes, Tumblr users, you’re going to see more of them. Here’s Mayer, with a preview, via a Wall Street conference call this morning:

“On Tumblr, there’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that is meaningful and really addititive to the user experience.

For example, Tumblr has what’s called the “dashboard”, which is their version of the newsfeed — or in old school terms, an “inbox” for the blogs you follow. So basically different bloggers that you follow can all appear there in your feed.

And today, Tumblr already does some advertising, though minimal, in that feed. We would like to look at them and understand how we could introduce ads — in a very light ad load — where the impact is really created, because the ads really fit the users’ expectations and follow the form and function of the dashboard.

We also see some opportunities to possibly work with bloggers who want ads, to provide ads on their Websites. That would always be done with the blogger’s permission”

Again, Yahoo has promised “not to screw up” Tumblr, and there are plenty of cautionary tales to help them avoid doing that right away. So I wouldn’t expect a flood of ads swamping Tumblr in the next year or so.

On the other hand: It’s a free Web product, which means it’s not really free at all. So if you’re using it, you’re going to pay with your eyeballs. You’re not surprised, right?

Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr
Promises not to screw it up

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & NEW YORK — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Tumblr announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr.

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day. Its tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! is expected to grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent.

The deal offers unique opportunities for both companies. Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.

Total consideration is approximately $1.1 billion, substantially all of which is payable in cash.

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands – established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

“I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of the creator. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve ever worked with,” continued Mayer. “David’s respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome. I’m absolutely delighted to have him join our team.”

David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, addressed the Tumblr community, “Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo! and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has her own announcement, where she repeats most of the same information from the official memo, but also includes an animated GIF.

And here’s Tumblr founder David Karp’s memo, which is even more … Tumblrier.

News!

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing.

So what’s new? Simply, Tumblr gets better faster. The work ahead of us remains the same — and we still have a long way to go! — but with more resources to draw from.

Yahoo is the original Internet company, and Marissa and her team share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. I couldn’t be more excited to have her help. We also share a vision for Tumblr’s business that doesn’t compromise the community and product we love. Plus both our logos end with punctuation!

As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down.

Fuck yeah,
David

You can count on it — when a deal works out spectacularly everyone involved will take credit for it. This behavior is particularly annoying to the entrepreneurs who put the sweat, blood, and tears into the Company.

– “Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, one of Tumblr’s earliest investors, celebrating the Yahoo deal without celebrating

It’s a totally obvious move that will make the popular bookmarking site more useful and less inspirational (a.k.a. full of pretty photos that don’t actually link to anything). You could think of it like the Pinterest version of Twitter’s Cards.

The added information comes from a whole bunch of stores (e.g. Anthropologie), food publications (e.g. 101 Cookbooks) and movie databases (e.g. Netflix) that have partnered directly with Pinterest. There are some sizable names in there of brands that are willing to pass over a whole bunch of metadata to Pinterest and its 50 million or so active users: eBay, Target and Sony among them.

The features are only available to Pinterest users who have opted into its recent redesign, which was not universally popular but has been modified since launch.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s many other content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for Tumblr employees as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal way back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

Billion-dollar-plus price tag? Check!

Yes, all of that describes the Yahoo-Tumblr deal. And it also describes Google’s move to buy YouTube in the fall of 2006.

Which doesn’t mean the two deals are parallel, of course. For starters, the $1.6 billion Google spent on YouTube was a drop in the bucket for the search engine. But $1.1 billion is spending is a very big chunk of Yahoo’s cash pile.

And even back in 2006 it was clear that video would be a crucial part of the Web. You can’t use the same certainty when you talk about cat GIFs.

More important is that, then and now, Google viewed YouTube as a nice complement to its core business, which has never flagged. For Marissa Mayer, it’s a crucial part of her strategy to bring new eyeballs to a faded brand.

Still! Fun to compare and contrast.

Here’s what we know about Tumblr: It’s seven years old, has a lot of users, and last year it lost money on $13 million in revenue. And for YouTube: It turns eight tomorrow, is reportedly on track to generate $4 billion in revenue this year*, and Google executives keep murmuring that it either is or could be profitable.

More interesting for today: Here’s what YouTube’s financials looked like for a two-year period ending August 2006 — shortly before Google bought it (the document comes courtesy of the never-ending Viacom-YouTube copyright fight). Note the sharp uptick in revenue, users and costs at the end. Perhaps Yahoo saw something similar:

youtube pl

*As with all YouTube revenue estimates, take Morgan Stanley’s most recent one with a big chunk of salt.

How much porn? You’ll have to make something up, because the only people who know how much porn the blogging service hosts work at the blogging service, and they don’t offer up a number.

But let’s stipulate, for argument’s sake, that there is indeed a lot of porn on Tumblr — in fact, the company’s terms of service make a point of saying it’s okay with “not suitable for work” stuff.

Which means there are a lot of pages on Tumblr that advertisers won’t go near. Like “Girls in Yoga Pants,” where the image at the top of this post came from (yes, that’s a tame one).

So why isn’t that an issue for Yahoo, which is very close to spending $1.1 billion on the company?

Here it’s important to pay attention to the way Tumblr actually works — or more precisely, the two ways it works.

Tumblr offers tools to make simple blog pages, which anyone with a Web browser can see. So you don’t have to sign up for Tumblr to check out We Want Porn, but comScore will count you as one of the service’s 117 million monthly users.

Tumblr’s core users, though, log in to the service, and subscribe to different Tumblogs, which they view on a “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s newsfeeds.

Not coincidentally, these are also the only people Tumblr is showing ads to, either via “radar” ads that promote Tumblr pages alongside users’ dashboards, or “spotlight” ads that promote Tumblr pages in a directory of suggested accounts.

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

So: Problem? Sure. But it doesn’t look like a costly one.

Update: Now that the deal is done, a Tumblr backer has piped up to offer a more concise version of my argument: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard follower model, opt-in.” That would have saved me a bunch of typing!

mama_mia/Shutterstock

Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO.

Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be.

The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “long-term investments,” products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis.

Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon.

Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making that aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home.

And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing. And as of last week, just over one million people had installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network.

What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas. Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, runs only on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years.

Home isn’t the only long-term bet. Look at Graph Search, Facebook’s search product rolled out earlier this year. Almost immediately came calls saying “watch out Google!” from the public. Perhaps Google’s stranglehold on the search market could be upset by a social form of discovery.

But Graph Search is possibly in an even more nascent phase than Facebook Home; Graph Search has only been rolled out to a select amount of users, and Facebook has oodles of work to do if it wants to curb the way people make Web search queries and focus them on people, places and things inside of the Facebook network.

Granted, Facebook has made serious moves in the past year to spur profitability further, releasing a slew of new ad products, revamping its gaming platform partner ecosystem and pushing, however slowly, into online retail with Facebook Gifts. It has consistently hit its numbers in the company’s quarterly earnings calls. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Evelyn Rusli wrote, the company made significant internal shifts over the past year that have made more teams responsible for Facebook’s revenue.

And still, the needle hardly moves on Facebook’s stock ticker; it closed at around $26 per share on Friday, well below the $38 it opened at one year ago. For all of Facebook’s long-term posturing, the Street remains cautious.

“We don’t build services to make money,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his company’s S-1 prospectus before Facebook’s Nasdaq debut. “We make money to build better services.”

Hopefully, for the sake of the shareholders, Facebook can do both.

Karp’s interviewer is Howard Lindzon, who’s now known as the guy behind StockTwits. Assuming that the interview was taped close to the time it was published, it would have meant that the two men were talking as Karp was raising his first funding round of $750,000, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

No need to say anything else:

The London-based financial newspaper (and competitor to The Wall Street Journal, which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) saw both its main website and several Twitter accounts attacked, according to a report by another British newspaper, the Telegraph.

As of 10:30 am ET, Twitter accounts belonging to the FT’s Lex column, its tech news section and a few others were all suspended.

But this attack was a little different from the more recent moves by the pro-Assad group. Lately, they’ve stuck to attacking the Twitter accounts of Western media organizations including CBS, the BBC, the Guardian and the Onion. This time, they actually attacked the main website, as well, and left headlines announcing that they had visited.

Zach Seward of Quartz.com nabbed a screenshot, which he shared on Twitter:

Syrian Electronic Army appears to have hacked the Financial Times tech blog http://t.co/M2RAVhgDP3 @fttechnews http://t.co/A3r2JVuZWm

May 17, 2013 5:03 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@zseward

Zach Seward

But if you want to make the “pro” case for the deal, here’s how to do it: Pretend that Yahoo is Facebook, and Tumblr is Instagram.

The Facebook/Instagram deal is just over a year old, which means it’s still pretty early to gauge it. But so far it seems to have worked perfectly.

Facebook promised that Instagram would operate autonomously after the acquisition, and from the outside it appears to have kept that promise. People who read sites like this know that the two companies are linked, but lots of other people don’t, which is a huge plus for Instagram. (See: Parents who won’t let their kids use Facebook, but are okay with Instagram. For giggles, tell them the two are owned by the same company, and watch their faces turn ashen.)

And we’ve yet to see Instagram clutter up with lots of ads — or any ads at all. Result: The app is still growing like a weed, which helps mollify critics who worry about Facebook’s inevitable slowdown.

So that sounds like a pretty good model, right? Can Yahoo do the same thing with Tumblr?

Maybe. Tumblr is a much more mature company than Instagram, with a much bigger infrastucture. Kevin Systrom had about a dozen employees when he sold his company. After keeping his staff super lean for many years, David Karp has been on a hiring spree, and Tumblr’s head count is on track to hit something like 200 this year, with its own sales staff. So it will be harder to just tuck that away in the Yahoo org chart.

The crucial difference between the two scenarios, though, has less to do with the seller than the buyer.

Facebook bought Instagram because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to remove an obstacle. If Marissa Mayer buys Tumblr, it’s because she’ll be looking for a boost.

That makes it much less likely that she’ll be able to resist leaving Tumblr alone, and letting it figure out how to sell ads. Zuckerberg can drop a billion (or so) on Instagram, leave it unmonetized for a year, and Wall Street shrugs. Hard to imagine investors reacting the same way to this one.

Look out Facebook! Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously. First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago.

– Rupert Murdoch, still steamed about that whole MySpace thing, tweets a warning to Facebook

Only in the past few years has the Central Intelligence Agency issued standardized guidelines on how to use social media, according to one former intelligence official. The line these guidelines draw appears to be thin: Revealing too much on Facebook and Twitter risks tipping too much to the other side. But given that social media use is becoming ubiquitous, revealing too little could also arouse suspicion.

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