Yahoo may be considered a dinosaur among tech firms, but they’re one of the few companies that’s buying SF office space instead of unloading it, and they just scooped up an available floor at Third and Folsom streets.

As San Francisco’s downtown continues to struggle with record office vacancy, the optimistic thinking goes that AI companies will eventually arrive to save downtown, with their mountains of investor cash, and promises of exciting, world-changing technologies. Well, the latest company swooping in to buy SF office space does not exactly meet that description. The SF Business Times reported that Yahoo just bought up a whole SoMa office floor that was available for sublease, that is, the 14th floor at 680 Folsom Street (at Third Street).

They’re subleasing the 14th floor from the task management software company Asana, who themselves had subleased it from Macy's in 2022. According to the SF Business Times, Asana also took the 13th floor in that sublease deal, which they’re still trying to unload.

This deal apparently happened a while ago and has just become public now. In the tweet above, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone (and honestly, who had any idea who the CEO of Yahoo was these days?) indicated about a month ago “Our new Yahoo SF office opens in March at 3rd/Folsom. Always long on the Bay.” Per the Business Times, this deal closed “third quarter of 2023,” so this happened sometime between July, August, or September of last year.

So all of this begs the question… what does Yahoo even do these days? Well, they still own TechCrunch, Engadget, and (for what it’s worth) AOL.

It’s difficult to explain this to someone under 30, but Yahoo was once the undisputed tech champion of Silicon Valley. They were much a much bigger search engine than Google, and their homepage was a kingmaker of entertainment and politics. The company was unable to keep up with consumer shifts to mobile and social media, so they bought the popular social sites Tumblr and Flickr, but promptly ran them into the ground. Yahoo was sold to Verizon in 2016, and then turned into something bizarrely called Oath. Verizon sold Yahoo off to a private equity firm in 2021.  

Who knows, maybe there are better days ahead for Yahoo. But I don’t see them putting one of SF’s best neon billboards back up again anytime soon.

Related: Pinterest Offloading Yet Another Office Building In SoMa, This Time at Fourth And Brannan Streets [SFist]

Image: TMG Partners

Yahoo just got caught in a major plagiarism scandal and is having to pay up big.

A federal jury in Oakland says the Sunnyvale-based web portal and online services company has to give a software company $15 million for infringing on its search technology patent. A Texas-based software company called Droplets Inc. has a patent on software, dating back to 2004, that lets users reach specific portions of a website without having to download the entire page, as the Chronicle reports.

Other companies have also been up against lawsuits for infringing on that patent in the past. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and YouTube all ultimately reached licensing agreements with Droplets. But Yahoo decided to go to trial, contending they had developed their own quick-search technology prior to Droplets.

Yahoo and the investment company that currently holds the controlling stake in the company, Altaba, argued that the platform’s methods were its own, but the jury was not convinced. The jurors didn’t believe, however, that the infringement was “willful,” but they ruled unanimously that Yahoo’s Search Suggest feature infringed on Droplets’ patent. That feature lets users type phrases or individual words to do quick-searches within a web page.

Courtland Reichman, one of Droplets’ lawyers, tells the Chronicle that the victory was an important one.

“This validates decades of effort on their part in that they changed the way the internet works,” Reichman says. “You have to protect inventors, or they’ll stop inventing.”

Woody Jameson, a lawyer for Yahoo, tells the paper that Droplets had sought damages of $260 million and was awarded less than 6% of that. The jurors also threw out claims of patent infringement on four other programs Droplets’ lawyers went after.

“Yahoo took this case to trial because it strongly believes that Droplets’ patent has nothing to do with Yahoo’s technology,” Jameson said in a statement to the Chronicle. “While we certainly hoped for a complete defense verdict, we are pleased that the jury rejected entirely Droplets’ contention that four of the five accused technologies infringed” any patents.

This payout is only the most recent of Yahoo’s financial troubles.

The company agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit monitoring after what was, at the time, the biggest security breach in history, according to the Associated Press.  

A data breach in 2014 affected 500 million user accounts; a year before that, another hack compromised the information of 1 billion users. Stolen information, the AP reported, included names, email addresses, passwords phone numbers, birthdates, and the answers to security questions.

Yahoo plans to appeal the verdict in its Droplets case.

“We remain confident that when the litigation process is complete, Yahoo will be found to not have infringed Droplets’ patent,” Jameson said about that appeal.

Droplets has another trial coming up in June for a similar lawsuit against Nordstrom, Inc.

Photo: Unsplash

Tumblr is changing hands once more, and Yahoo parent company Verizon is reportedly offloading it for less than one percent of what Yahoo paid for the company in 2013.

The buyer, according the Wall Street Journal, is San Francisco-based Automattic Inc., which owns and operates the content management and publishing software Wordpress. The company is reportedly taking on all of Tumblr's 200 employees, and the purchase price of the company was undisclosed — though Axios pegs it as below $10 million. (Axios business editor Dan Primack heard it was actually just $3 million.) That would mean that Tumblr is worth less than one percent of the $1.1 billion Yahoo bought it for six years ago — but as Axios says, that purchase price was shocking even then, given that Tumblr was only making about $13 million a year in revenue at that point.

Much of Tumblr's content over the years has of course been porn, and the platform's user base dwindled significantly in the first months of this year after Verizon instituted a ban on adult content. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg tells the Journal that he plans to keep the porn in place. He says he sees the site as complementary to Wordpress, and as a longtime Tumblr user he says it's "just fun" and he is "not going to change" any of Tumblr's functionality or character.

Earlier this year, PornHub had reportedly made an offer for Tumblr, even though Verizon appears to have cleansed the adult content in order to ready the company for auction.

As it stands, Twitter is the only large social media platform that still allows adult content.

Highlighting just how complicated it's apparently been, even internally, to sort out the major breach of Yahoo from 2013 that was only first revealed to the public 10 months ago, Yahoo's new parent company Verizon Communications just disclosed that actually far more people's Yahoo accounts were affected in that breach than was previously understood. Rather than 1 billion accounts, or about a third of users who had ever used the platform, all 3 billion accounts were actually impacted, as the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

This revelation comes via a spokesman for the newly created Verizon unit Oath, under which the Yahoo and AOL brands now fall. Per the Journal, the spokesman ominously cited "new information from outside the company" that they received last week, declining to clarify further where the new information came from revealing the greater extent of the breach. While likely less damaging than the Equifax breach given the extent of the information believed, the Yahoo dataset breached in the hack included things like passwords, email addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers.

Bloomberg reports that the stolen data did not include "passwords in clear text, payment data or bank accounts."

Back in March, the FBI indicted four Russians in the Yahoo hack, saying that it had likely come as a result of "a "spear phishing" via an email to a top-level executive at the company that resulted in hackers getting key login information for the company's servers. A two-year investigation by the FBI's San Francisco office resulted in charges of hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft, and economic espionage against the four suspects, the first of their kind against Russian officials, including two members of the Russian intelligence service FSB.

Yahoo has never said that they identified the source of the hack — they did point to a "state sponsored actor" when first revealing a smaller hack of 500 million accounts believed to have happened in 2014, a year ago last month. However as Bloomberg reminds us, the original hack was discovered by internet security expert Andrew Komarov, who had allegedly observed Yahoo's dataset being sold on the dark web three times, including once to a probable intelligence source that listed out "10 names of U.S. and foreign government officials and business executives to verify that their logins were part of the database."

In terms of number of users, the Yahoo breach was already the largest in history, and now it's likely to hold on to that title even longer.

Previously: FBI Charges Russian Spies In Yahoo Hacks, May Have Been 'Spear Phishing' Attack

As noted last night Yahoo's (last?) CEO, Marissa Mayer, is jobless following the company's completed acquisition by Verizon. So what's she going to do now, besides checking her bank balance for that estimated $23 million severance package? Send some Gmails, she said Tuesday.

Before you get too jealous of that $23 million, know this: After a March investigation into Yahoo's botched hack management, Mayer was denied her annual bonus this year, some $2 million in cash and stock. Looking further back, if Mayer had been booted in 2014, her severance would have totaled around $157.9 million, multiple news orgs reported at the time. That package's worth dropped to $59.3 million in 2015, and to $37 million as of March 2016. OK, sure, we can still all wish we had that $23 million, but I think we can also all agree that that missed chance to get fired for $157 M in 2014 would nag at us, just a little.

Mayer, who told staff as recently as last July that following the sale "I’m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you," officially resigned Tuesday. That same day she published a Tumblr (ha, remember Tumblr!?!) post detailing her accomplishments. One of the greatest, she says:

We fundamentally improved Yahoo Mail, completely rewriting much of the infrastructure to provide a far more flexible and reliable system, while creating a robust mobile offering. Mobile Mail recently surpassed desktop Mail in daily users, which shows the power of the product and the platform we reinvented

However, it appears Yahoo Mail wasn't improved quite enough, as while speaking at the Accelerate-Her Forum in London, Mayer said she was looking forward to getting back on the Gmail train.

Consumerist reports that "Mayer later noticed that her remark was zipping around the world, and Tweeted that her remarks were taken out of context, and she still has room in her heart for two email services and apps. She looks forward to seeing how Gmail has changed in the last five years, and since its early days."

But, let's get real. When it comes down to it, most efficient people only use one inbox, because flipping around between multiple platforms is a goofball waste of time. In the end, well...you saw The Highlander. Which service do you think will end up winning the newly-jobless Mayer's heart, Gmail or Yahoo mail?

Previously: Verizon Combining Yahoo And AOL Brands Into New Company Called 'Oath,' God Knows Why

• Ghost Ship suspect Max Harris was arraigned in Oakland today, and he's expected to be entering a plea alongside co-defendant Derek Almena on Thursday. [NBC Bay Area]
• And friends of Harris who gathered in support at the courthouse were pretty irritated with the media being there. [Chronicle]
• Marissa Mayer has officially resigned from Yahoo as that deal closes with Verizon, taking home her $23 million golden parachute. [Chronicle]
• North Beach icon Captain Cool, a.k.a. Patrick LeBold, has died at the age of 70, apparently from complications from throat cancer. [Hoodline]
• [Socketsite] has word on plans for a hotel on the former site of Amsterdam Cafe, currently home to Hanaro Cocktails on Geary.
• The SFMTA is planning even more of those red transit-only lanes. [SFMTA]
• A trans man is filing suit against the Seattle Public Library for their refusal to let him use the only private bathroom in the building, which is reserved for families. [Associated Press]
• A woman who threatened gay club patrons on Sixth Street in San Francisco in April 2016 is getting a nine-year prison sentence despite her defense's argument that she is bisexual herself and therefore a part of the LGBT community. [ABC 7]
• Waymo engineers announce that that cute little car we all love is no more, and their primary model will will be that self-driving minivan instead. [Medium]
• Did you know almost all statues in SF are of men? [Chronicle]
• Despite widespread rumors this morning that they had dissed President Trump, the Warriors so far say they've made “no decision” on making a visit to the White House. [CBS 5] [Snopes]
• Mayor Lee is planning to propose a 2018 cannabis tax ballot measure. [Examiner]

It's no secret that the "unpaid internships" even the most qualified of us might have been offered in years past have been replaced at many tech companies by rates nearly twice America's median income. We've talked about this before, when we looked at an informal intern pay survey from 2014 and a similar one from almost exactly a year ago. But in news that might be a consolation to the more schadenfreude-y among us, a look at summer intern pay rates for 2017 reflect lower — or, at best, the same — pay this over last.

This, according to Mill Valley-based job site Glassdoor, which in its "25 Highest Paying Internships in America for 2017" report says that Facebook is intern payday number one, with a median monthly internship salary of $8,000.

According to last year's data, Facebook was sixth on a list behind companies like Pinterest and Twitter, neither of which even charted on this year's Glassdoor list. In the 2014 list, Facebook paid $6.8K per month.

Salesforce snagged the #4 slot on the 2017 list, with a median monthly pay rate of $6,450. Last year, their pay was a reported $6,500, but Towers don't come cheap so I'm sure those $50 here and there came in handy. It doesn't appear that the company made the 2014 list.

Apple's #6 on this year's list, with a median monthly intern pay of $6,400. That's down from a reported $6,700 in 2016 and $6,500 (plus a $3,500 monthly housing stipend) in 2014.

You get the picture. Some of the other companies that made the list this year are Yelp ($6,400, down from $7,300), Yahoo ($6,080, down from $6,500) and Google ($6,000, down from $6,600). You can see Glassdoor's entire 2017 rankings here, and can compare it to 2016's widely-reported salary survey by Yelp intern Rodney Folz and 2014's likely Glassdoor-based salary report.

The median salary for a full-time US worker is currently $51,350, Glassdoor says, and according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics, in 2016 it was $44,148. Does that mean the American Everyman is catching up to the Silicon Valley kids? Not yet, as that kid's annual Facebook income would still be $96,000...that is, if she didn't have to head back to school in the fall.

Previously: Tech Industry Interns Making Upwards Of $10,000 Per Month
Here's How Much Tech Companies Are Paying Interns Who Can Code

Head of #FBI #SF John Bennett addresses media regarding the Yahoo hack by alleged Russian FSB agents and criminal hackers. pic.twitter.com/qIDxsHfzcK

— FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco) March 15, 2017

Justice Department officials today announced the indictment (here) of four Russians, two alleged spies and two alleged criminal hackers, in connection with twin hacks of more than 500 million Yahoo users, the Washington Post reports.

The indictments grew out of a nearly two-year long investigation by the FBI's San Francisco office with help from international law enforcement, and the charges — hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft, and economic espionage — are unique in that they represent the first US criminal cyber charges ever lodged against Russian officials. The spies are two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, we're told, and the hackers were hired by Russian officials to carry out their work.

According to the Post, the indictments of Dmitry Dukuchaev and Igor Sushchin are "particularly galling to US officials" because the FSB's cyber investigative arm where they were working is "a rough equivalent of the FBI’s Cyber Division." Dokuchaev was arrested in December in Moscow on treason charges for allegedly providing information to the CIA. Karim Baratov, a hacker-for hire, was arrested yesterday in Canada, where he has Citizenship, although he was born in Kazakhstan. The other hacker, Alexsey Belan, is likely being protected in Russia and is a known and wanted cyber criminal.

One interesting note from the indictment: Like the hack of the Democratic National Committee, this intrusion may have hinged on a "spear phishing" attack, in which an email purports to be from some official source and asks for password information. As Ars Technica explains,

Malcolm Palmore, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Silicon Valley office, told Ars in an interview that the initial breach that led to the exposure of half a billion Yahoo accounts likely started with the targeting of a “semi-privileged” Yahoo employee and not top executives. He said social engineering or spear phishing “was the likely avenue of infiltration" used to gain the credentials of an “unsuspecting employee” at Yahoo.

Critics of Yahoo say the company bears responsibility in the massive intrusion as it was slow to reveal the hacks, disclosing the first, from 2014, last fall. That seemed to be the largest data breach in history... until after it released information regarding another hack, even larger than the first, that occurred in 2013.

Related: After Internal Investigation Into Hacks, Yahoo Denies Marissa Mayer Millions In Bonus And Stock Awards

An update regarding the internal, independent board committee investigation of two massive Yahoo hacks, released yesterday along with a 10-K financial filing for the company for 2016, reveal a little more about who knew what and when concerning data breaches. The documents also display, according to the Associated Press, a company punishing its CEO, Marissa Mayer, for her role handling the damaging hacks.

Although the two hacks were carried out by an unnamed foreign state in 2013, they were revealed in their full scope to the public only as recently as last year, as the company sought to sell itself to Verizon. The Chronicle summarizes the report, which now claims that Yahoo senior executives and the company's legal team were aware of at least one 2013 hack as soon as a year after it took place, and though they “had sufficient information to warrant substantial further inquiry in 2014... they did not pursue it.” Calling out Yahoo's legal department, the report claims that the incident "was not properly investigated and analyzed at the time."

The fallout for Mayer, who is still at the helm of the company and will presumably remain so until such time as the sale to Verizon goes through, is a more financial insult than blow. She's being denied an annual bonus, which could be as much as $2 million, and a stock award worth millions more — but with a net worth of more than $400 million, she's expected to survive.

"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies." Mayer wrote on her Tumblr blog, implying that, even if she knew of a hack in 2014, she wasn't or couldn't have been aware of its scope. "However, I am the CEO of the company," she goes on, "and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company’s hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo’s success in 2016." It's unclear if the board is cool with that plan, by the way.

Meanwhile, Ronald Bell, Yahoo's general counsel, has resigned without severance pay according to the filing, which Vanity Fair portrays as unjust. [S]omebody’s head had to roll. That unlucky sap turns out to be Ron Bell," they write, characterizing him as the fall guy. Meanwhile, if Mayer leaves after the Verizon merger goes through, she's in line to receive a $44 million severance package.

RElated: No, Yahoo Is Not Gone, And Yes, Marissa Mayer Is Still Its CEO

An SEC filing from today reveals two seemingly major changes to what is left of the onetime web giant Yahoo, but the reality of the situation is less major shake up than corporate shell game.

What's happening: If and when Yahoo successfully merges with Verizon, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's CEO, will resign its board of directors as the company changes its name to Altaba. As Business Insider understands it, and as others are framing it too, assuming Verizon does indeed acquire Yahoo's operating business for the $4.8 billion it's proposed, this is the end of Yahoo and the end of Marissa Mayer's tenure as its CEO.

Actually, neither is necessarily the case. CNet clarifies that not all of Yahoo is being sold — just its consumer web empire, the home of Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports, etc. That will belong to Verizon, and it seems likely Verizon will seek continuity with those properties by keeping the Yahoo name attached to them.

What's left of Yahoo after Verizon buys all that? Oh, just its hugely valuable $36 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce mega-company Alibaba.

Per the SEC filing, the size of the board will be reduced to five directors in light of the changing nature of the company — it will operate as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940 — and Mayer, along with five others, will resign from the board while Eric Brandt will serve as its chairman, to be joined by four other board members. Finally, following closing, as the company wrote in the SEC filing, it will be changing its name to "Altaba Inc." from "Yahoo! Inc."

Marketwatch writes of all this that the news is being misconstrued and sensationalized. "Yahoo will still be Yahoo, Altaba will be a zombie company comprising a bunch of assets and few, if any, tasks, and Mayer may or may not still be running the actual Yahoo." In its analysis, Altaba will be nothing more than a ticker symbol — and one designed to better resemble the business it actually stands for, Alibaba.

Related: Verizon Angling For $1B Discount On Yahoo Following Hack And Spying Revelations

Demonstrating that allegedly allowing the US government to scan hundreds of millions of your users' emails may not just be abetting a violation of the 4th Amendment but also a huge financial liability, we learn via the New York Post that Verizon is seeking a $1-billion discount on the purchase price of Yahoo following revelations of hacking and allegations of spying at the company. News of the pending sale broke in July with an eventually agreed upon purchase price of $4.4 billion. That, however, was before the latest scandal hit the troubled company.

"In the last day we’ve heard that [AOL boss] Tim [Armstong] is getting cold feet," a source told the Post. "He’s pretty upset about the lack of disclosure and he’s saying, ‘Can we get out of this or can we reduce the price?’ ”

The cold feet in question follow a one-two punch of bad news for Yahoo. On September 22, Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Bob Lord announced in a blog post that "certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers."

The hack affected upwards of 500,000,000 accounts, he wrote.

Then, just earlier this week, Reuters reported that Yahoo was secretly scanning all incoming emails in real time at the government's behest. Congressman Ted Lieu told Ars Technica that the request was "flat out unconstitutional."

It seems these dual scandals were just too much for Verizon, and company execs are now wondering if they can get a huge discount. And this appears to be more than just sharks smelling blood in the water and looking to save a cool billion — "the discount is being pushed because [Verizon] feels Yahoo’s value has been diminished," sources told the Post.

Yahoo, for its part, is having none of it — with sources telling that Post that Yahoo executives are essentially saying "too late."

For his part, noted privacy advocate Edward Snowden thinks the takeaway is clear.

Previously: Yahoo Secretly Created Spyware To Scan All Incoming Email For Feds

At the request of the US government, Yahoo engineers last year secretly built custom software to scan all of its users' incoming email in real time — and then made that data available to US intelligence officials. Just how secret was this program? According to Reuters, Yahoo's Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos didn't even know about it. The siphoning off of user data was apparently so egregious that when Stamos's security team discovered it, they initially thought the company had been hacked.

While Yahoo's involvement (along with Facebook, Microsoft, and Google) with NSA spying program PRISM is well documented, this marks the first such time (that we are aware of) that a tech company has agreed to search all incoming messages — as opposed to a specific group of stored messages — as they come in.

According to the report, Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of incoming emails for either the FBI or the NSA — searching for specific keywords provided by government officials. The company was instructed to do so via a classified directive. Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer reportedly decided to obey the order, rather than fight it, and had a small group of engineers create special software to meet the government's needs — without involving Yahoo's security team.

In fact, the team only found out about it by accident — thinking that hackers had gained access to Yahoo.

What's more, when the program was discovered, Stamos reportedly told those involved that it had been constructed with a security flaw — possibly allowing (non-US government) hackers access to users' data.

Yahoo also recently made the news by admitting that over 500 million user accounts had been breached.

Following his discovery of Yahoo's bending over to the feds' commands, Stamos resigned and went to work for Facebook. Interestingly, it is likely that the government approached other tech giants, including Facebook, with a similar request, as Reuters reports that officials "evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target."

Other companies, however, may have decided to fight the government's request in court — a fact we do not know as under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the battle would have taken place at a secret tribunal. A more public battle was waged earlier this year when Apple refused to comply with a government order to create special software to hack the work phone of the San Bernardino shooter. In that case, officials ended up breaking into the phone on their own, by means several news orgs are still trying to figure out.

The ACLU, for its part, sees Yahoo's action as likely unconstitutional. “Based on this report, the order issued to Yahoo appears to be unprecedented and unconstitutional," explains ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey. "The government appears to have compelled Yahoo to conduct precisely the type of general, suspicionless search that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit."

And what does Yahoo have to say about all this? Basically, that they do as they're told as a "law-abiding company."

This story has been updated to include the ACLU's response.

Related: Facebook, Google, Other Tech Companies Reveal Vague Outlines Of NSA Surveillance Requests

Arianna Huffington, chairwoman, president, and editor in chief of the Huffington Post, will be these things no longer. “I fully expected to be able to continue leading HuffPost while also building Thrive Global,” Huffington tells the New York Times today, “But it became clear that this was an illusion as Thrive went from an idea to a reality, with investors, staff and offices.” Here, Huffington is referring to a wellness startup named for her book Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. A fearless advocate for wellness, Huffington is now fighting for controversial causes like a good night's rest, as she does in her book The Sleep Revolution. “One of the Thrive principles is knowing when it’s time for a new chapter to begin, and for me that time has arrived,” Huffington said.

While that's one real and also expedient explanation, another, as tendered by Recode and surely others, has to do with a crowding of the Huffington Post and a potentially forced change of her role there. As was announced at the end of July, Verizon bought Yahoo for $5 million. Yahoo's media tendencies might clash with another Verizon-owned media company, The Huffington Post.

More precisely, the hierarchy is this: The Huffington Post was sold to AOL five years ago, and then Verizon bought AOL last year. Now, with Verizon absorbing Yahoo, there's a little too much media at the company, and perhaps not enough love to go around. "It was pretty clear that in Yahoo/AOL, she wouldn’t have the same position that she has now," or so an anonymous source tells Recode.

So now Ms. Huffington will turn her attentions to Thrive Global, a "corporate and consumer well-being and productivity platform" with $7 million in funding and a $33 million valuation. As Business Insider notes, the company plans to focus on "curated commerce" focused on wellness — "think pillows, candles, and food supplements."

You know, with that kind of money, it can't be terribly hard to sleep at night.

Previously: Sunday Morning Coming Down: Verizon Buys Yahoo For $5 Billion

It appears it's time to pay the Seapunk piper. In a move that is sure to upset its diehard fan base, TechCrunch reports that as of tomorrow social blogging site Tumblr will place ads on all its users' blogs.

The official announcement was made yesterday, and frames the platform-wide rollout as a way for users to make money off their sites.

"Tumblr is a place where brilliant, creative, funny, impossible people shape culture," reads the announcement. "Some of you have even turned your passions into jobs: book deals, music careers, paid gigs with the Creatrs program. Now, (soon!) that opportunity will be available to any eligible Tumblr—poet, musician, fan artist, and misfit weirdo memelord alike."

What this exactly means is unclear, as Tumblr, which was purchased by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion, says it's not exactly sure what the ads will look like. However, we do know via TechCrunch that the service is going to be opt-out — meaning ads will be turned on by default.

"This was a long time coming, and will be one of the biggest projects we’ve ever launched at Tumblr," Tumblr founder David Karp wrote yesterday. "It’s been a busy summer—a new GIF maker, live video, new messaging stuff—and there’s a whole lot more on the way. Next up: getting you paid for your work."

It appears that users who wish to do so will be able to register with the company, and receive some slice of revenue from ad sales. The exact mechanics of this have yet to be released — or possibly even figured out. "We’re still working out the details of the partner program but as soon as we have details to share, we’ll make announcements right here on trusty Staff," the Tumblr announcement explains. "Just so you know: You won’t be able to make money until you register for the program—which is coming soon."

I'm sure the millions of "misfit weirdo memelord[s]" will get right on it.

Related: Yahoo Officially Announces $1.1 Billion Tumblr Acquisition, "Promises Not To Screw It Up"