Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says
Tumblr head Matt Mullenweg also assuaged users fears by confirming that the platform will not remove its chronological feed.
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.
They absolutely should but advertisers wouldn't like that.
Partially true: they want to bring it back but payment processors wouldn't like that (the post i am linking is from the CEO of Tumblr's parent company, who bought it from Verizon in 2019)
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?
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)
$100k avg salary for a New York tech company? The lowest level employees there almost certainly make well above that. If we're talking avg salary it's probably at least $200k.
Hedgefund investors need to pay for their caviar and cocaine somehow 😶
Can't they just depend on bootstraps from bailouts like they used to?
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.
Like Pixelfed?
Nah Pixelfed is more like instagram than tumblr.
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.
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.
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.
When you ban porn on your massively popular site for porn & drive off a massive segment of your userbase epic style
That was the old owners. The new owners have stated that they want to bring porn back but it's not really feasible because payment processors are anti-porn.
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.
I would pay $20 per month for a curated list of subscriptions to various news sources. The key word here is curated. If I subscribe to a news site, I don't want to hear about celebrity gossip. If I subscribe to a new music page, I don't want to see Beyonce on it. If I sign up for arthouse movie news, I don't want to hear about Pixar.
We've completely removed the idea of curators because "gatekeeping" and now we are stuck with what amounts to a corporate payola funded by the biggest players in the game.
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.
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.
They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr's own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.
Tumblr's biggest roadblock to monetization isn't their site structure or ideas, it's their community.
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?
Do we have a remind me bot yet?
I think we're going to discover that the current economic crisis is mostly a media campaign to try to stem the incoming flood of union wins.
Edit: I am also aware of the real recession economics happening - but the impacts are, so far, wildly lighter than we've been forcasting to follow the pandemic. Yet we are not seeing "recession is way less harsh than predicted" in the media.
I'm sure some of that can be explained by gloom and doom sells, and the tendency of doomsday cults to move their dates.
But I also believe we're seeing a coordinated anti union "keep your head down and keep your job" media campaign, right now.
Have they ever tried using their own website? It one of the most confusing experiences
Unless they're just pissing away money on high level management I cannot imagine how all of these social media companies have been unprofitable.
For the surprise of nobody
![[TECHCRUNCH] Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/eb433d47-7848-4559-ad5d-2e4447a6a03a.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)