Yahoo!’s recent $1.1 billion acquisition of blog network Tumblr will allow the California-based Internet giant regain its relevance among a younger audience, said Rafael Jimenez, VP of Strategy & Integration at Havas Worldwide Mexico.
Jimenez, former Managing Director of Yahoo! Mexico and co-director of its Latin America operations, told Portada that Yahoo! Mexico users (excluding Yahoo! Respuestas) fall into the 35-44 age bracket, while Tumblr’s users are in the 15-24 age group, according to comScore data.
“It’s an excellent move by Yahoo!, which seems to be regaining ground overall under Marissa Mayer’s leadership,” he said.
“This is Yahoo!’s most high-profile acquisition under Mayer, but there have been other interesting purchases in the mobile and content fields as well.”
Jimenez, a pioneer of interactive communication in Mexico ̶ where he founded a digital agency in the early 90s and was president of IAB Mexico for three years ̶ thinks the announcement that both networks would operate independently was a wise choice.
He recalled that in the past, other Yahoo! acquisitions such as Delicious and Upcoming eventually disappeared, while Flickr has resisted but has lost ground to Instagram.
International reaction
A day after the announcement of the Tumblr purchase, international analysts were insisting that Yahoo! has already encountered its first problem: the pornography that runs rife through Tumblr blogs.
“For a small company with no board of directors or shareholders, this did not pose the problem that it may end up being for Yahoo!, which faces the ethical standards of a multinational company,” quoted news agency EFE from a media experts’ analysis.
According to SimilarGroup data, 11.4% of the most visited sites on Tumblr are adult content sites; 16.6% of Tumblr’s traffic occurs on adult blogs, and more than 22% of its traffic comes from links on pornographic sites.
Tumblr’s presence in Latin America
The social network’s penetration in Brazil is very important, given that it is four times that of the Mexican market and six times larger than in the Argentine market, according to consulting firm Quantcast.
Below is a list of the 20 countries in Latin America where Tumblr has a significant presence:
Country | Unique Users | % Uniques | Index | % Impressions | Impressions |
Brazil | 12,116,388 | 7.75 | 227 | 8.37 | 306 |
Mexico | 3,040,789 | 1.95 | 138 | 1.68 | 186 |
Argentina | 1,964,899 | 1.26 | 163 | 0.79 | 147 |
Chile | 1,751,437 | 1.12 | 268 | 1.52 | 410 |
Colombia | 1,493,997 | 0.96 | 157 | 0.52 | 156 |
Venezuela | 597,927 | 0.38 | 122 | 0.30 | 116 |
Peru | 515,195 | 0.33 | 83 | 0.17 | 70 |
Ecuador | 195,985 | 0.13 | 80 | 0.07 | 64 |
Puerto Rico | 172,032 | 0.11 | 147 | 0.21 | 190 |
Uruguay | 143,052 | 0.09 | 128 | 0.06 | 119 |
Costa Rica | 126,730 | 0.08 | 114 | 0.06 | 107 |
Dominican Republic | 106,530 | 0.07 | 108 | 0.05 | 73 |
Trinidad & Tobago | 94,701 | 0.06 | 163 | 0.06 | 102 |
Guatemala | 93,198 | 0.06 | 84 | 0.03 | 65 |
El Salvador | 71,027 | 0.05 | 104 | 0.03 | 93 |
Jamaica | 69,932 | 0.04 | 127 | 0.04 | 81 |
Panama | 67,713 | 0.04 | 95 | 0.04 | 98 |
Bolivia | 61,622 | 0.04 | 67 | 0.01 | 37 |
Paraguay | 53,513 | 0.03 | 121 | 0.02 | 110 |
Honduras | 43,950 | 0.03 | 86 | 0.02 | 76 |
Traffic volume by country in a 30-day period. The indexes were calculated by comparing the percentage of traffic in each country’s sites with Internet traffic patterns measured by Quantcast. For example, an index of 500 means that the site has five times more traffic than the country’s leading site with regards to average Internet use.
Updated: May 2013
Source: https://www.quantcast.com
The company’s undeniable market penetration in Brazil is reflected in the list of the top 11 cities in Latin America analyzed by Quantcast, which found eight of them to be located in Brazil, as seen in the following graph:
City | Unique Users | % Uniques | Uniques Index | % Impressions | Impressions |
Sao Paulo (BR) | 1,658,372 | 1.03 | 206 | 1.08 | 232 |
Río de Janeiro (BR) | 996,702 | 0.62 | 222 | 0.72 | 274 |
Mexico (MX) | 725,168 | 0.45 | 120 | 0.35 | 162 |
Buenos Aires (AR) | 698,508 | 0.43 | 160 | 0.29 | 161 |
Belo Horizonte (BR) | 498,864 | 0.31 | 216 | 0.31 | 293 |
Lima (PE) | 450,255 | 0.28 | 88 | 0.17 | 77 |
Curitiba (BR) | 394,913 | 0.25 | 253 | 0.31 | 396 |
Salvador (BR) | 371,056 | 0.23 | 225 | 0.32 | 354 |
Brasilia (BR) | 362,194 | 0.23 | 239 | 0.30 | 397 |
Recife (BR) | 326,696 | 0.20 | 270 | 0.28 | 413 |
Porto Alegre (BR) | 312,942 | 0.19 | 255 | 0.20 | 356 |
Translated by Candice Carmel
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