Wow. Did not expect Tumblr to be doing better than Twitter.
They should bring back the porn.
They sort of kinda did. You can post nudity now. Not porn, but nudity.
And the dirty little secret about Tumblr is, people were still posting porn, this whole time, they just weren't caught because Tumblr wasn't actually looking for it that hard.
So in the end all that decision did was hurt them for no reason. Doing nothing would have been better.
What I want to know about these "unprofitable" tech companies is where all the money is going? Wikipedia, which is run entirely on donations, has an operating budget of ~$150 million. Reddit, Twitter, etc... make many times this amount and even with the greater number of employees and salaries it still sounds like some creative Hollywood accounting that they're unprofitable. It feels like a big chunk of money is just going to investors/C-classes so they can just say they're not actually making any money while the big players get their payday.
That was my reaction when I heard Spez whine about reddit not being profitable.
How much money did you waste on bullshit? If you'd just focused on running the damn platform I instead of reinventing it into the monstrosity it is now, how much better might you be doing?
That valuable and incredibly useful NFT tech ain't gonna develop itself! /s
Trend chasing like this always shows me what CEOs are just morons with no vision
What this number suggests to me is that Tumblr has revenue less than 20 million dollars. I figure:
Some of these numbers can be up or down, but when I worked at a similar company in New York, we had operating expenses in the same range. (Coincidentally, we had revenue on the same range, and got sold off in a fire sale)
Hedgefund investors need to pay for their caviar and cocaine somehow 😶
Wikipedia Foundation actually spends more money giving grants to other projects/orgs than they spend on hosting costs, and that’s still like 20% of their budget!! It’s so crazy
Really good point, and great reminder that I don't appreciate Wikipedia enough. They've been doing the same thing for 20+ years with no ads and only the occasional ask for money. And I think they know better than to try and make money or go public when all of their content is user-generated.
If they had just sherlocked xKit and left the site alone — not adding the live video shit, etc — most users wouldn’t care about the ads. I swear it’s like every social network is just copying each other, remember when everyone added stories because of Snapchat, and how everyone is adding TikTok style videos now? Tumblr’s biggest mistake was doing that, it should’ve just stayed as it was. People are on tumblr because they like tumblr. If they wanted TikTok, they’d download TikTok.
Tumblr was THE place to be for artists. Someone should make a federated alternative.
In big tech 30 million is a rounding error
Is Tumblr really big tech though?
In a distant past it was...
Maybe it's time to socialize social media? All these activitypub-based projects are open source, open governance, and many of them are receiving government grants already, so let's just pay the server costs via taxpayer money and call it a public service.
Putting Tumblr on ActivityPub could be interesting and potentially save it, but there's so much deleted content from when it was in its prime that I'm not sure if it's even worth it. The platform is so dead.
That said, giving taxpayer money to private social media businesses is the worst idea ever. In the first place, public money should mean public code.
So that might explain why the promise to federate with the fediverse (made late last year during the twitter migration) hasn't gone anywhere.
Tumblr said they would federate???
Yep, ages ago, and we've all been wondering what happened to it. With Threads promising to federate soon, it's reminded us that we're not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta, and that we were hopeful not long ago of many not-entirely-evil-companies joining the fediverse. Medium and Mozilla have set some things up, as has flipboard, and tumblr were supposed to be a big addition ... that just hasn't eventuated.
I used to be interested in Tumblr joining the Fediverse, as someone who strongly prefers Tumblr's long-form microblogging to Twitter's format. Unfortunately, Tumblr has shown itself to be just like any money-hungry corporation at a smaller scale.
Tumblr is trying to push Tiktok-style short video Tumblr Live, which is filled with trackers, and they have plans to change their UX to be more like Twitter because Twitter is more profitable. Tumblr has the advantage of having a very low percentage of technical users, who accept these changes and don't find workarounds because they don't know what's going on.
With the direction Tumblr is going in, I'd defederate it if it ever starts federating. I want a Fediverse software that mirrors Tumblr's long-form microblogging, not Tumblr itself and definitely not its horrible community.
Thanks for the reply.
we're not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta
Agreed. I'd like to see Tumblr join the fediverse, though recently it seems to be focusing on Tumblr Live rather than such a big change as federating. Interesting with Medium as well.
Maybe this says something about my awareness of the world: I didn't know Threads wasn't the first.
Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only "losing" it in accounting terms because of paying more than $30M a year for "trademark use rights" to a company based in an offshore tax haven, said company being nothing more than a metal plate on a door next to the plates for 100s of such "companies" and 100% owned by the very same parent company as Tumblr?
Because if there's one thing which is common in Tech companies is using intelectual property legislation and convoluted corporate structures to create accounting losses for the purposed of paying no taxes (and publicly claiming poverty).
Same thing in Hollywood (hence the expression "Hollywood Accounting"), by the way, which is how they just recently claimed they "couldn't pay more because they were losing money" to the actors' union representatives during recent negotiations.
Mind you, such accounting trickeries can be undone by Courts (which can just deem that the "for tax evasion only" daughter company is not actually a real company set up to do business, so all those "intellectual property costs" used to create accounting losses legally become just an internal transfer of money within the same company, hence not a cost, hence do not reduce declared profits and the tax on them.
However there is no actual Political will to do so, which is why even though the laws for it are in the books, they're almost never applied.
Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only “losing” it in accounting terms
this was my instant thought on the headline. what business that is truly losing $30,000,000 every year is going to stay open?
When you ban porn on your massively popular site for porn & drive off a massive segment of your userbase epic style
They put ads into their mobile app, between every 2nd post, that are literally scamming users to look at or click them, and they still come out negative?! Jeez. If ads are really bringing in so little money, maybe its time to drop the whole "free service with ads" business model and go back to subscriptions.
who could have ever predicted such a dramatic downfall oh no
Internet would be dead if porn was banned in the 90s
Woah, Tumblr is still around? I'm not surprised they're losing that much money. They're just caught in the middle of the short form journal of tweets/toots/threads and the photo blogging of IG.
Tumblr is still popular with the 2000s LiveJournal crowd, i.e. people who need 500 words not 500 characters or 500x500 pixels.
It's still around, and doing quite well at least from a community perspective. It's an underdog platform and the users want to keep it that way for the most part. The problem, though, is that the staff don't know how to monetize it properly. The thing they push the most is an ad-free subscriptions service which is already doomed to fail because everyone uses adblockers.
I don't get how there's so many different companies failing to make a profit and staying afloat, isn't Uber also running at a loss?
Have they ever tried using their own website? It one of the most confusing experiences
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
