Image: Deviant Art, CC
Yahoo!, the company that created the website your grandparents may still have as their home page because they haven't figured out how to change it, just ponied up $1.1 billion for the "micro-blogging" service Tumblr. That's a lot of money to spend on anything, especially a social media site that is basically Blogspot with a sexy design.
Yes, $1.1 billion dollars. We hear about an awful lot of things that cost about that much, but I posit that we rarely take a minute to sit back and absorb just how much fucking money that is. So I'm going to try to put into perspective how much a popular micro-blogging platform is worth in 2013:
There are about 25 sovereign nations whose gross domestic product is equal to Tumblr. Economically speaking, Tumblr is apparently worth more than a year's worth of work of every single person in Somalia, whose GDP is 1.06 billion (same goes for Grenada or Samoa or Zanzibar).
With one Tumblr, you could purchase sixty-eight million seven hundred fifty thousand Brooklyn Nets-themed plastic cups from Tumbler.com.
Tumblr is worth 275 Super Bowl commercials, which were priced at about $4,000,000 per 30-second ad this year.
With one Tumblr, you could buy 251,716,247 Big Macs. Or pay Oprah's salary for 3-4 years.
Tumblr is worth 6% of NASA's annual operating budget. $1.1 billion dollars is almost enough to buy you the Burj Khalifa. It would get you 73% of the world's tallest building to be exact. But Tumblr's worth enough to buy you almost all of 432 Park, the new ultraluxury tower by Raphael Vinoly that's rising on Park Avenue.
Or, instead of Tumblr, Yahoo! could buy 135,200,000,000 bitcoin.
If any Burning Man is counting, the micro-blogging service is worth roughly as much as 16,369 lbs of MDMA, or 9 military grade combat drones from General Atomics.
Finally, Tumblr = 733,333.333 pairs of Google Glasses. Which makes at least one deal where I'd rather have Tumblr.
But let's get even realer for a second. Let's talk cash money. This packet of $100 bills you are looking at is about a half inch thick—and it's worth $10,000 in all:
Here, then, is what one billion U.S. dollars looks like:
Pull up another crate, and you've got enough cash to buy a micro-blogging site.
With additional research from Erik Franco.