Tumblr's Unclear Future Shows That There's No Money in Internet Culture (nymag.com) 58
Earlier this month as Verizon completed its acquisition, a number of Tumblr employees, as well as those at other Verizon-owned properties, like the Huffington Post, were laid off. This comes at an interesting time for Tumblr, which is increasingly struggling to find a business model. From an article on NYMag: The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd -- that's partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 -- but despite a user base near the size of Instagram's, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect. For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users' timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It's tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard. Since it joined Yahoo, the site has started displaying low-quality "chum"-style ads in between user posts on the Dashboard. Looked at from a bottom-line perspective, Tumblr is an also-ran like its parent company -- a once-hot start-up that has eased into tech-industry irrelevance. [...] It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr's size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business. Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit.
what TUMBLR really is.... (Score:5, Informative)
it's a huge depository of porn. Google site:tumblr.com followed by the most insane sexual practice you can think of and you will get hundreds of picture of said insane sexual practice.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That just makes it worse. If the worst cesspool for porn cannot make money, then the internet has lost all hope. Now pass the tentacle links to help me through this difficult realization....
Give me a fucking break. The largest cesspool of porn is the internet, and anyone should consider themselves lucky if they're still making money with online porn today.
Kind of like social media, most consumers would be pissed if you asked them to pay for it.
Re:what TUMBLR really is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet somehow porn continues to make money enough to afford to make actual productions with directors, producers, cameramen, makeup artists, and the renting of homes and other places to use as sets, in addition to paying the cast.
It could well be that like a lot of other industries, as little as ten percent of the consumers of pornography drive ninety percent of the sales. This has been noted in other industries that have been argued as vices, like alcohol and tobacco, it's the alcoholics and chain-smokers that make the profits for the sellers, not the occasional drinkers or social smokers. It may well be that the vast majority of those that in some way use porn would not really ever pay anything substantial for it, but those few that would pay are willing to spend a lot of money for the productions that their favorite actresses or actors are cast-in, or for any ancillary products associated with those cast that are available for sale.
Either way, just because you or I find it strange that someone would pay for such content, doesn't mean that everyone else feels the same way. Clearly that the market exists indicates otherwise.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet somehow porn continues to make money enough to afford to make actual productions with directors, producers, cameramen
You mean Sean?
makeup artists
Sean's girlfriend Summer.
the renting of homes and other places to use as sets
Sean and Summer's place.
in addition to paying the cast
Sean and Summer again.
With all those overheads you wonder how they make it pay.
Re: (Score:2)
I would reckon than 3 percent of porn consumers pay for the lot.
but because it's basically 3 percent of all people on the planet, it's still quite a lot of money to go around.
it's not that easy to make money with random copied porno though so there's that against tumblr.
the money is in how much money you can take in and how much it costs to run it. clearly the guys at tumblr should have just focused on cost optimization.
twitter guys should have focused on that too like a fucking decade ago.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Too bad they're all compressed and resized.
Re: (Score:1)
You really don't need to type site:tumblr.com. Just searching something like "banging midgets tumblr" will have equally positive* results.
*Note results aren't actually positive if you're not into banging midgets.
Re: (Score:2)
"No Money in Internet Culture"
should read:
"No Culture in Internet Culture"...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Sadly, not for long.
All Tumblr "blogs" that have been marked as NSFW will be _inaccessible_ if you're not logged in to a Tumblr account.
This shit will start on July fifth. (Happy Fourth, everybody!)
Source: https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/231885248-Adult-content
Quote:
> * I marked my blog as explicit. What happens now? ...
>
> Also, starting on 7/5/17, anyone viewing your blog on the web will have to be logged in (with safe mode off) to see it.
Re: (Score:1)
it's a huge depository of porn. Google site:tumblr.com followed by the most insane sexual practice you can think of and you will get hundreds of picture of said insane sexual practice.
Which is a wonderful thing!
Re: (Score:2)
It shouldn't cost that much if all you want to host the site and keep the software patched, without the numerous side projects that a lot of Internet companies to get into to boost revenue.
Re: They Said The Same About Facebook. (Score:1)
No they didn't. Zuckerberg and his VCs knew right off the bat that it was going to be an advertising company.
And Yahoo! Buying tumblr just shows Mayer's incompetence as a CEO.
I thought those "geniuses" in Silly Valley might have gotten some business sense since 2000, but as we can see, they are still throwing money away with no plans on how to get a return.
And she is gonna walk away from Yahoo! With over a hundred million dollars for doing a job that would have gotten her fired anywhere else.
Anyone
Re: (Score:2)
SEXIIIIIST!
(in b4 AmiMoJo)
Re: (Score:1)
That's cool I don't mind being called a sexist. It's correct to say Meyer did a poor job trying to turn around Yahoo. And that buying Tumblr was a bad business decision. She was incompetent at being CEO of Yahoo. It's impossible to argue against that now with all the information we have on her job performance.
I'd rather be called a sexist, racist asshole than someone who pretends facts don't matter. I might be a jerk, but at least I'm honest. Those who sling words like sexist and racist around in orde
Re: (Score:3)
I'd rather be called a sexist, racist asshole than someone who pretends facts don't matter. I might be a jerk, but at least I'm honest.
Here on Slashdot, for that we have the -1 Troll mod.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, it's the investors that throw money at them, what are you going to do about it?
Re: (Score:1)
challenge accepted.
Re: (Score:1)
Godspeed, you magnificent bastard.
Re: (Score:2)
There are unscalable mountains of pornography on Tumblr.
Not to mention pictures and videos of actual rapes.
who cares about the porn? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It COULD be a creator's haven... but it's not (Score:1)
Think about Twitch or Patreon, if you get followers you can start collecting donations, tumblr could easily skim off of the back of content creators, but no, they are stuck in the bad side of the Twitter business model (which is direct marketing at users) (I might add without the GOOD side of the Twitter business model - deep analytics)
A lot of artists I know are jumping over to twitter, tumblr has a lot going for it but its dying squirtle...
In the meantime I'll continue pumping out weird content that thous
cloenesdigital (Score:1)
What the Internet is good for anymore (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It is turning more and more into the net depicted in 1975 in John Brunner's book The Shockwave Rider [wikipedia.org].
Also elements from Pohl & Kornbluth's 1952 book The Space Merchants [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
There's no money in anything you don't bill for. (Score:2)
The only way to monetize a website without charging its users is to cater to advertisers. This makes your service less useful to the people who cause it to be relevant to those advertisers. It is an inherently moribund business model, and has only persisted as long as it has due to bubble economics and the
Re: (Score:2)
Advertisement is pervasive both online and offline. What people want to avoid is advertisement that demands their attention and cannot be ignored, or in some cases actually malicious.
There may be new media, but its still using old fashioned payment methods. I'm not going to buy a subscription to every paywalled news service that happens to offer up an interesting article stub, and so far there hasn't been any universal micropayment system to fill in the void.
Given the critical mass of Google and Facebook si
Re: There's no money in anything you don't bill fo (Score:2)
New media is that which has the means to spread directly from the source, and which
Re: (Score:2)
I'm reminded of the youtube political commentators where many of them have urged their audience to support them via Patreon after the advertisement policy was changed. For me, their critical observations serve as an indispensable counter to the agenda-driven reporting, and I've taken to supporting them in this method.
I've noticed that many artists and musicians have turned to Patreon as well, seeming to find good results in the pay-what-you-want method of funding. That's not exactly your typical MBA style b
Puffs on unlit pipe, nods sagely (Score:4, Funny)
No money in internet culture? There's not a great deal of culture in it either.
Re: (Score:1)
There's plenty of culture on tumblr. It's very similar to the culture that is on the bread that has been in my cupboard for the past 9 months.
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter *could* be profitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit.
Because Twitter has too many employees! They have 3,860 employees. Are they working on a self-driving car or something? What in the fuck are all of those people producing?
Re: (Score:1)
Right now, they are almost all eyeballing the feeds trying to censor the "hate" posts. And it's not enough.
Re: (Score:1)