Tumblr’s young demographic doesn’t just ignore Yahoo — they don’t know what it is.
When Yahoo was founded, Tumblr's most important demographic wasn't even born. This — not profit or monthly active user numbers or corporate image-making — is what explains why Yahoo wants Tumblr.
Yahoo is not the kind of site people have a strong affinity for. As a search engine, or a portal, it's the type of site you choose out of familiarity, or by default. It's the largest homepage of the post-homepage era. As a result, it doesn't seriously overindex in any demographic. Perhaps its most enthusiastic users are old, but they're few, too. The majority of its users are, if anything, apathetic. They're just there.
Tumblr, on the other hand, is the young internet users' service of choice. It's rotten with young people, including a great deal of teens, many of whom use smartphones to check it and make updates (the only way Yahoo is on young people's smartphones now is as a logo in Apple's weather app).
Young people dictate Tumblr's culture, and their interest dictates its future. David Karp, Tumblr's founder, has remained a sort of adult teen avatar, allergic not just to selling out, but to making any money at all.
Tumblr's demographic index, according to Quantcast.
Karp is known to be capricious and hard to read, which may help explain why early news of Yahoo's interest in Tumblr came as such a surprise. Chris Mohney, Tumblr's Editor in Chief until an unceremonious and surprising editorial purge in April, tells BuzzFeed over email, "What's to get beyond a giant pile o' cash? Nobody outside of senior management had a clue, far as I know."
Regardless of the management mechanics of the deal, and whether or not Karp will stay on as Tumblr's leader, a Yahoo acquisition would allow him to relinquish the one responsibility he seemed to relish less: the responsibility to keep Tumblr solvent.
