
Tumblr Lands $85 Million in Funding - revorad
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/tumblr-lands-85-million-in-funding/
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timjahn
This celebration of "businesses" who make no money (and show no interest in
making money) has to stop. It's one thing if we call them what they are - neat
little side projects.

But if we're to believe these companies are businesses that make money and put
food on the table, that's hogwash.

~~~
rudiger
Tumblr gets over 10 _billion_ page views a month. It's something bigger than a
"neat little side project." The criticism of Tumblr (and Twitter) that they're
not "real" businesses or that they're not interested in making money ignores
how young these companies are and how early in their lifetimes we're judging
them.

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timjahn
Can 10 billion page views a month feed my 13 month old?

~~~
blader
You give me 10 billion page views like Tumblr's a month, I'll feed your 13
month old myself, out of pocket.

~~~
lovskogen
How?

~~~
minikomi
False accounts propping up trend setters fueled by entertainment / fashion
industry needing to promote..

(Just thinking out loud)

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vide0star
What percentage of Tumblr traffic is pornography?

~~~
vide0star
It's interesting that this question keeps getting mod'd up and then mod'd back
down again. Elephant in the room? For as successful as Tumblr's growth has
been, my guess that it's in large part due to the platform distributing a
bazillion free porn images and videos. I would be curious to know how much of
their traffic is actually porn. My sense is it could be > 80%.

Fwiw, I have nothing against porn. I think it is part of what powers the
internet. But I think it's disingenuous to tout the success of a site when
you're giving away something for free (much like free music or videos)
virtually everybody wants.

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tyler_ball
As a long-time Tumblr user I've always wondered, do they have income?

There are no ads on the site, and no premium plans or pricing (other than the
paid themes, but I assume that most of that goes to the theme's author) that I
can see. How can it last?

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Maro
They have some impressive numbers:

 _Mr. Karp said that Tumblr’s growth has exploded in the past year. It’s
attracted popular musicians such as Lady Gaga and traffic leapt to 13 billion
page views per month from 2 billion page views per month. Since the site was
first introduced, 30 million blogs have been created using the tool. Those 30
million blogs now generate more than 40 million posts each day._

 _A recent report from Nielsen said that the audience for the site tripled in
the past year and has drawn more female teens to the site than any other
social network. Although Facebook still dominates the majority of the time
Americans spend on the Web, occupying more than 53 billion minutes each month,
Tumblr manages to capture a reasonable share of screen time as well, with more
than 623 million minutes per month._

So the avg. American spends ~3hrs a month on Facebook and 2mins on Tumblr.

~~~
corin_
Not really a useful calculation to make.

Obviously Facebook is a lot more popular, and if you can't see that from
reading "53 billion" vs "623 million" then...

What is interesting is some other statistics that show Tubmlr to be
impressive, such as:

\- 10% more "minutes spent" by US visitors than Twitter

\- Tumblr generated the second most UK pageviews of any social network, after
Facebook (again, obviously, a long way behind Facebook)

\- With 11 million unique US viewers, Tumblr has less than Twitter (23m),
Wordpress (22m), MySpace (19m), LinkedIn (17m), yet has more minutes spent on
it than any of those. Blogger has 50m uniques (321% more than Tumblr) and only
700m minutes (16% more than Tumblr). All this shows that while it isn't huge
in how many people use it, the audience it does have is much more engaged that
other sites.

~~~
Maro
It's useful because 3 hours and 2 minutes are figures that I can easily
remember, 53B and 600M not so much.

~~~
corin_
But unless 100% of Americans use both these services, that is irrelevant, so
essentially all you are doing is finding the lowest common denominator - and
if you're wanting to do that, why wouldn't you go with defining facebook as
"90x more", i.e. 90 / 1 rather than 180 / 2.

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Torn
Has Posterous lost the race against Tumblr yet?

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morsch
There's also soup.io. Does anybody use that outside of Europe? Apparently
they've got 800k monthly unique visitors vs. 13.4 million for Tumblr.

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bond
Like the other guy said: "Show me the money!"...

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stfu
Has anyone figured out how to use tumblr in some "meaningful" way e.g. not
just reposting the same old memes over and over again? I still struggle to get
the point of using it.

~~~
wanorris
There are tumblr subcultures that are more like a sequel to LiveJournal, which
makes it more meaningful (at least to those users) than just a meme delivery
device.

It also gets some use as sort of an improved Twitter. If you like a post you
can, um, Like a post, reblog it as is, or reblog it with a comment of your
own. You also get much better options for embedding media easily.

Of course, if you don't have any interest in having a LiveJournal and don't
want an improved Twitter (with a lower user count), there may still not be any
point to _you_ using it.

~~~
stfu
thank you wanorris. actually a helpful reply. appreciate that!

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johnx123-up
Congrats!

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johnx123-up
Why downvoting? (answers will help me to fix myself)

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samof1976
Cool! Congrats.

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mathattack
The game is still going! It's great to see that bad news on the IPO market and
broader economy is not killing upstream entrepreneurs.

