

Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? - gaiusparx

Both are free blogging services, no price plan, no add-on charges, free support. And I'm not aware there is ads too. Where do they get their income? Consultation fee? Writing a book about their platforms?
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Tichy
I seem to remember that Posterous tested changing outgoing links to go through
a affiliate program proxy. Not sure if they kept it up.

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staunch
I just checked. They do appear to still be doing that.

a4agarwal's response at the time <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849>

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Tichy
Opinions obviously differ widely on that one. To me it is unacceptable,
especially if done in such a sneaky way. Other people seem to be fine with it.
If enough people who are fine with it become their customers, why not.

I don't think they announced this big when they rolled out their massive "all
other blogs are stupid" campaign...

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gramakri
VC funding :)

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unohoo
Platforms like posterous and tumblr rely heavily on scale - ie, a large number
of users. So, their first priority is to get as much users on board as
possible from other publishing platforms. Once they reach a certain threshold,
they can start experimenting with revenue generation - be it in form of
advertising or premium hosting etc.

Thats similar to the way Wordpress played out.

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retube
Sure. But how the hell do they convince investors to get on board? Any future
numbers are so pie-in-the-sky, and revenues so far off, why would anyone touch
it?

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nl
It's not pie-in-the-sky.

Anyone should be able to make between $4 & $5 per 1000 visitors from just
running AdSense.

Use that as a baseline and do the math from there. If you can add-on non-
advertising forms of revenue then that is a bonus.

~~~
rphlx
Maybe $4 per year. GOOG keeps reducing AdSense payments to help provide
quarter-over-quarter income growth.

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nl
Got math?

It's going to depend on your field of course, but it's pretty easy to get
between 0.5 & 1% clickthough and 10c per clicks. That's between 50c & $1 per
1000 _pageviews_ , and I said $5 per 1000 visitors (ie, uniques). If you
double the CTR (quite doable with optimization) and get 2 pageviews per
visitor then that's $4/visitor already...

If you prefer, look at it like this. The lowest Adsense eCPM I've seen over
any medium period by anyone I know is $0.70.

Posterous is doing around 1.5 million pageviews per day
(<http://www.quantcast.com/search.jsp?domain=posterous.com>) and Tumblr is
doing over 60 million.

Getting revenue with that much traffic wouldn't be _too_ hard.

~~~
rphlx
I was being snarky, but, AdSense payouts are trending endlessly downward as
far as I can tell, and that scares investors. At least it should.

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sjtgraham
Shouldn't the question be 'do they make money?'

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Throlkim
I would assume that they're building momentum before they introduce premium
services. Flickr's probably quite a good example of this. I know Posterous
have mentioned that they'll be implementing paid-for extras in the future, but
that the current offering will remain free.

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fletchowns
Doesn't seem fair that somebody can come along and offer a service for free/no
ads in order to get people to switch over from a provider that charges/has
ads, only to eventually switch over and do the same.

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BrandonM
Considering that they do not lock you in (they allow to export your content),
I see nothing at all unfair about it. If you have your own URL that you point
to your blog, switching should be pretty seamless as far as your readers are
concerned.

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gsiener
Tumblr has launched a number of premium add-ons, like themes and getting
featured in their directory.

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macarthurrobert
"Coca-Cola is using Posterous for its NCAA “Dept of Fannovation” where people
can come up with ideas to improve the experience of being a fan, and a chance
to win $10,000."

[http://ycombinator.posterous.com/posterous-s08-jumps-on-
the-...](http://ycombinator.posterous.com/posterous-s08-jumps-on-the-revenue-
wagon-sign)

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pavs
I recently started using tumblr and its mind blowing how much they allow you
to do for free. There have very little limitations, if any. They allow you to
put ads on you blog with no string attached AFAIK, custom domains (other do it
too).

I think they make a decent amount of money on premium theme and get your blog
listed on featured directories and other paid features.

I was hoping that they would allow API access to password-protected blogs. I
use marsedit to post on my blog, but can't do it on my private blog.

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maushu
Posterous is selling domains for around $25 per year (with discount for more
years).

I don't believe they make all the money from that though, but I'm sure it
helps.

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josefresco
Wholesale cost on domains has got to be less than $5 or so for them so they
make a little. Not much though.

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taylorwc
It's a classic freemium model. Their modus operandi is going to be get as many
hyper-engaged users as possible, and hope to monetize by either introducing
premium-type features, or gathering user data and advertising (but probably a
combination of all available options).

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csomar
They don't have a clear income. They aim to get big and then think of income
after that. I don't like this model, because at first, I'll have to rely
heavily on Buzz and VCs.

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niico
Tumblr now has some premium features such us paid themes and blog promotions

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rogwil
good one. nice and good site check out this.
<http://www.shrtnews.blogspot.com>

