• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, February 15, 2016

Since dropping about $1 billion on Tumblr back in 2013, Yahoo has had high hopes for the social network. At the very least, some of Tumblr’s cachet among cool, mobile-first kids was supposed to rub off on the aging Web portal.

Rather than lifting Yahoo’s prospects, however, Tumblr appears to have been weighed down by the digital dinosaur and its prehistoric business practices.

Just last month, Yahoo took a $230 million write-down on Tumblr and sheepishly admitted that the unit had failed to meet revenue expectations.

Last year, Yahoo said it was expecting Tumblr to take in more than $100 million in ad revenue and achieve positive EBITDA. Coming from CEO Marissa Mayer during a quarterly earnings call, the disclosure offered a rare glimpse of Tumblr’s financial health -- or at least Mayer’s expectations for the unit.

Last week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman said Tumblr had missed that $100 million target. 

To get Tumblr back on track, Yahoo execs are now reportedly reconsidering an earlier decision to integrate its sales teams. That arrangement, as sources tell Business Insider, was responsible for many of Tumblr’s current problems.

Amid a broader class of cultures, Tumblr lost a number of key salespeople following the merger of the two sales teams. In particular, Lee Brown, head of Tumblr’s sales team, left early last year for BuzzFeed.

Rather than giving up on Tumblr, Yahoo is making the unit key to its comeback plan. Yet the bigger questions remains whether Yahoo can come back at all.