The news broke this morning that Yahoo, which had been discussed as a potential buyer for Hulu, the streaming video portal set up by the broadcast networks, decided to make another investment instead. For $1.1 billion, up from a valuation of $800 million in September 2011, Yahoo has purchased the microblogging and social networking site Tumblr.

One of the reasons Yahoo bought Tumblr is simple: it was available. Facebook bought photo-editing-and-sharing app Instagram last year, a move that made sense given Facebook’s focus on social distribution of information, particularly of images. The bulletin-board service Pinterest pulled in a $200 million round of funding in February, but it’s not clear that the company would be open to a sale, or even if it were, that Yahoo would have been interested in the business model, given the uncertain path from getting revenue out of Pinterest. Various estimates seem to be putting Twitter’s value between $9 and $10 billion, and the company seems more likely to opt for an initial public offering than to sell out to another social media or internet company. Facebook’s IPO is a year old. Of the large social media companies examined by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, that left Tumblr as the property available to Yahoo if it wanted to buy another popular service.

But even if there had been another appealing property on the block—and speculation continues to swirl about whether another company will buy Hulu—Tumblr would still have been appealing for two reasons, one a hard figure, one a perception. The first is that 13 percent of internet users aged 18-29 told Pew that they use Tumblr, a figure that suggests that an enormous number of Tumblr users could be coming online in coming years. The second is the perception that Tumblr is a female-driven service. That isn’t quite accurate. That same Pew study found that 6 percent of both male and female internet users report that they’re on Tumblr, though the sample Pew used is slightly weighted towards women, surveying 956 women out of 1,802 total respondents. But whatever the actual numbers, the perception is that Tumblr has a female-heavy user base (as well as a strong LGBTQ one).

So when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.

Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.

The bridge is yours.

-R.I.P. Ralph McQuarrie. We are all crying droids today.

-Distract yourself: Yahoo’s original web series debut today.

-If you can’t live without more Katniss Everdeen, you are in luck.

-Jeff Goldblum will break up with Sarah Silverman on her new show.

-If Disney made Game of Thrones:

Paul Graham, the founder of start-up seeder Y Combinator has decided that the fight over SOPA and PIPA proves that Hollywood is a dying industry, and has issued calls for competitors to kill it:

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

That’s a big task, and one that comes with formidable obstacles. First, there’s the cost. Hulu’s spending about $500 million on content in 2012. That’s the total cost of making Avatar, including investments in cameras and a $150 million marketing budget. There are other companies that are spending more money, Netflix among them, but that money is going to buy up access to back catalogues as well as to original programming. But the point’s clear: it will take time for rivals to rise up who can spend as much money creating and marketing products as Hollywood does. And while there’s certainly proof that you can make fascinating, visually engaging, and financially successful movies for less than Hollywood typically does (District 9, anybody?) you’re not going to put Hollywood out of business when you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of making product and getting consumers interested in it.

Second, and relatedly, knowing how to distribute content isn’t the same thing as knowing how to produce it, or to spot what’s good about a project, or to know how to make it work. That means that organizations like Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu, all tech companies that are producing original content, are going to have a learning curve in producing good material. Particularly if the reason to try to kill Hollywood stems more out of a distate for SOPA than for formulaic storytelling or the lock of straight white men on the industry in a way that limits storytelling. And they’re going to have to figure out how to get customers to consume it regularly without the predictability of a movie release calendar or a network. These challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but they are a hurdle.

Third, I don’t know that there’s good evidence that there will be a direct tradeoff between movie spending and other forms of entertaining. Video game sales are outstripping movie tickets, but it’s not like movie ticket sales have declined in relation to the rise of video games: in fact, both industries have experienced a similar downturn in the recession. And certainly, video game creators have an interest in Hollywood surviving as a way to spin off games into movies that help extend and make more durable existing franchises. There may be new forms of entertainment in 50 years, but I’m not sure it’s going to entirely replace movies or television, both of which have proven to be durable art forms even as our ways of consuming them change, posing both distribution and storytelling challenges. I don’t doubt that we’ll get new and exciting forms of entertainment. But I don’t think we’ll have to kill Hollywood to get them.