You can’t say that Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has sat on her laurel’s since joining the company. In fact, she’s made quite a shakeup in terms of people and purchases lately. The latest, a reported $1.1B acquisition of Tumblr (announced by Mayer on Tumblr) is an incredible deal in terms of content for Yahoo… but what else?

Audience

The millions of Tumblr users just became potential audience for Yahoo in their bid to bring the once-power portal back to the homepage of the web. Beyond the numbers, the audience of Tumblr is about as different as you can get from the core Yahoo user – younger, hipper, and more digitally savvy. Yahoo must be banking on the fact that they’ll be able to create positive feelings toward the Yahoo brand… something these young(er) users don’t have.

Content

If you look at changes Yahoo has made to their News Stream, you’ll notice a definite shift toward social content – especially after last week’s addition of Twitter news to the stream. By adding Tumblr content to the mix, this brings an added dimension of personalization to the news experience that wasn’t there before.

Ad Opportunities

This is somewhere Tumblr will actually benefit from Yahoo’s experience. Yahoo can work to implement higher-value advertising products into Tumblr in order to capitalize on the millions of eyeballs it pulls in every day. This will marry with the content flow in order to allow brands on Tumblr an additional way of promoting their content outside Tumblr’s promoted post functionality. 

One thing that’s worth noting (for the time being) is that Tumblr will continue to operate separately… That’s not to say the teams won’t be working together to create cross-property integration, but you won’t surf to Tumblr and see a Yahoo! logo anytime soon (at least not in place of  a Tumblr one). 

For more info, read Marissa Mayer’s Tumblr post on the acquisition and make fun of the .gif used.