Ziff Davis boasted in a release that the deal with elevate the company to the position of No. 1 property in the tech category, per comScore. “The acquisition of NetShelter fully returns Ziff Davis to the dominant market position in the technology vertical,” Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said in a statement. “We will combine our best-in-class ad targeting capabilities and trading desk expertise with what our marketers need most today. High-quality, high-impact inventory that’s available at scale on trusted sites frequented by tech enthusiasts.”

News of the deal was first reported by TechCrunch on Sunday. Ziff Davis publishes popular tech sites like PCMag.com and Geek.com, while NetShelter has MacRumors.com and other sites under its umbrella. 

Speaking about the deal, Bennett Zucker, Ziff Davis’ svp and gm of data solutions, echoed Shah’s sentiment. “As a company, Ziff Davis started out many years ago as a print publisher. (It) has enjoyed some very high highs and endured some very low lows along the way. Since June 2010 when we really began to reinvent the company, it’s been our mission to recapture that No. 1 spot in technology as a goal. And this acquisition, on top of some others we’ve made the last couple of years, gets us there.”

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Well, Ms. Mayer, twenty-something Tumblr marketers have strong advice about how you can keep that promise. Of course, it’s how you incorporate more ads into the site experience that may ultimately determine whether Yahoo either lifts six-year-old Tumblr to new heights or damages its ever-important street cred.

“Advertising should never be the first, second or even third thing you see on Tumblr,” warned Conor O’Hallaren, 25-year-old lead strategist for retail-focused agency Gin Lane Media. “It should just be a part of your natural feed. And if they give it too much priority, it will dilute the experience.”

O’Hallaren recently helped Adidas run a #MyGirls initiative targeting 13-to-17-year-old females internationally on Tumblr. “That demographic is on Tumblr and Instagram,” he explained.

Per comScore, 46.5 percent of Tumblr users (the site has 102 million blogs) are between 18 and 34 years old. Will they and their even younger counterparts flee Tumblr under Yahoo’s stewardship? The answer to that question will go a long way in determining whether Mayer’s big move pays off (as well as whether or not brands continue to lift spend for the platform).

facebook‘s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram 13 months ago seems to provide Mayer & Co. a bit of a game plan in terms of “not screwing it up.” At the time of the purchase, many wondered if Instagram would lose its cool factor while joining the fold of Mark Zuckerberg’s digital giant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case. The Instagram audience has only grown since the deal, though facebook hasn’t brought ads to the mobile app just yet.

However, in that case, facebook was clearly looking to quickly swallow up mobile-social competition rather than bolster monetization right away. Yahoo likely cannot be as patient with Wall Street closely watching the financials in the aftermath of this humongous investment. Some marketers argue that Yahoo may be ill-fitted to run Tumblr.

“There’s not a natural connection between Yahoo and Tumblr the way there was with facebook and Instagram,” said Leila Thabet, U.S. managing director We Are Social.

O’Hallaren from Gin Lane Media, added, “With a big acquisition like this, I am sure they want to capitalize on it. They need to put in advertising that’s unique to the platform. I wouldn’t want them to [implement] some of their other platforms too directly into Tumblr. If they are smart, they won’t. I think there is a kind of advertising on Tumblr that seems like it’s supposed to be there—things like animated GIFs or very short video clips.”

It’s only been a year since Tumblr began selling ads, introducing its Radar and Spotlight products that have proven popular with brands. Erin Dooley, a 27-year-old digital content manager at happylucky, which runs Adidas Neo’s Tumblr efforts, disliked the idea of an old-Internet, ads-minded player like Yahoo taking ownership of the social blogging site.

“Social platforms as a whole should move away from their perpetual end-goal of being acquired,” Dooley said. “It inevitably leads to a shift from something their users enjoy to being overwrought by the interests of advertisers. Once a channel grows to the size that puts them in a position to be of value, they should look to their community to define how the platforms they have created can be evolved to support the users.

“It should be the responsibility of advertisers to understand and adapt to the platforms as they exist,” Dooley continued. “They need to start seeing the platforms as places to create interesting content for users, not just another place to push ads.”

Hear that, Yahoo?

Meanwhile, Thabet (who at age 32 is an elder Tumblr user) makes a pretty good point about the marketing-tech bubble’s reaction to the Yahoo-Tumblr deal compared to the greater world. “To Joe blogger, will it even matter?” she asked.

Indeed, the biggest tech news in months produces far more questions than answers.

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Mignon Clyburn (D) makes history today as the first woman to head up the Federal Communications Commission. That history, however, will be short-lived. Clyburn is only keeping the seat warm until the Senate approves President Obama’s nominee of Tom Wheeler as chairman.

Clyburn’s first meeting as Acting Chairwoman will be June 27.

Chairman Julius Genachowksi (D) and Commissioner Robert McDowell (R) ended their FCC stints on Friday and both are headed to think tanks. Genachowski is joining the Aspen Institute and McDowell the Hudson Institute. The two announced their resignations within days of each other in March. 

How long Clyburn will serve as Acting Chairwoman will depend on how quickly Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), chairman of the commerce committee, can hold a hearing on Wheeler. He originally hoped to schedule it for May and now that’s slipped to June. If Rockefeller sticks to custom, Wheeler’s nomination will not move through the Senate until it is paired with a GOP nominee, which President Obama has yet to name.

In recent days, a number of names have surfaced  for the GOP nominee, including Ray Baum, a senior policy advisor to Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.); former FCC staffer Michelle Connolly, a professor at Duke University; Neil Fried, the senior telecommunications counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee; and A. B. Cruz, the former chief legal officer for Scripps Networks.

Until Wheeler and a GOP commissioner come on board, a process that could take months, the FCC will be doing business with only three commissioners.
 

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