Yahoo Inc.'s board has approved a $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr Inc., a service that hosts 108 million blogs, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified sources familiar with the matter.
Tumblr will continue to operate as an independent business and a deal was expected to be announced as early as Monday, the sources told the newspaper.
Yahoo also was expected to unveil updates to its Flickr photo-sharing site in New York on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said.
Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David Karp, Tumblr had more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site recently began letting advertisers pay for prominent placement, putting the company on a path to achieve profitability this year, executives said in March.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been adding features designed to win back users who have fled the Web portal in favor of competing sites such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.
CEO since July, Mayer had little to show for her efforts to turn around the company as of last month, when Yahoo reported a drop in its main display-advertising business and issued a sales forecast for this quarter that may fall short of analysts' estimates.
Mayer's push to revamp products such as Yahoo's home page and email have made little headway to reverse a decline in display, an area where Google and Facebook are gaining ground.