
Tumblr - rmason
https://avc.com/2019/08/tumblr-2/
======
laser
I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred
is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the
tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the
deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a
$3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just
want to close the deal to take the deduction and stop the losses.

Still, considering the fact that Tumblr still does over 2.5 billion page views
per month [1], not even counting their mobile usage, I can't help but gawk at
what a steal Automattic got. Really drives home what their CEO Matt Mullenweg
said on here the other day about adopting a "Berkshire model"—although he was
referring to independent management, what he's really talking about is buying
companies grossly undervalued for dirt-cheap. Just monetizing the web traffic
2.5 billions monthly hits at a $1 CPM alone would generate $2.5 million a
month in revenue, $30 million annually.

What kind of business, let alone web business, sells for 1/10th annual
revenue? For reference, Reddit does 6x the page views, but is valued at $3
billion. Reddit's prospects are obviously better, but are they 1000/6 = 166x
times better per current page view? Mind-boggling.

[1]
[https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com)

~~~
nostrademons
IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued. I've done some whole-web
analysis and they (including both the open-source project and the hosted
service) account for roughly 18% of the web. The volume of content produced on
them (in terms of # of words, not # of messages) is greater than on Twitter.
If you look at comparables - with Twitter valued at $30B, Reddit at $3B, and
Wordpress valued at $1.16B - it's pretty hard to justify those valuation
disparities. Sure, it's open-source and non-hosted-by-them Wordpress installs
don't really make much money for the company, but you could argue that they
actually have more control over the greater Wordpress ecosystem than Reddit
does over famously revolt-prone subreddits.

Unfortunately, they're private, profitable, and to my knowledge not seeking
investment, otherwise I'd buy a slice of them in a heartbeat.

~~~
wyqydsyq
> IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued.

It's kind of hard to put a monetary value on a product that is free

------
galfarragem
Tumblr is an hidden secret and totally underrated.

I run two niche blogs on tumblr since 2011 with full control of themes and
content, https, social sharing, without compulsory ads and using my own
domain. SEO was a negative point but nowadays is good enough. All of this for
free. Wordpress offer, AFAIK, is not nearly as good.

Thank you Tumblr.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I agree, I use it to look at paintings and to blog about painters I am
researching and it’s wonderful the depth and breadth of content available on
so many subjects. My feed is overflowing and I’ve only skimmed the surface.

------
aussieguy1234
As a long time Tumblr user, it's sad to see it's downfall.

I had hope that Automattic would change the content policies that brought the
site down, but it seems that won't be the case.

But the fun isn't over just yet. I've launched Libr
([https://librapp.com](https://librapp.com)) to replace Tumblr. It's an
installable Progressive Web App, getting around app store rules (recall when
the Apple app store banned Tumblr).

There's a few hundred users on there that have given me good feedback on
improving Libr and it's starting to slowly take off, although I'm not in any
hurry and I'm taking my time to make it awesome before turning on the
floodgates.

~~~
zrobotics
Please fix your site- it breaks the back button. This looked interesting, but
I immediately hate any site that breaks back-button functionality; and once I
notice that I instantly assume either malicious intent or incompetence.

I get that it's a PWA, but can't the welcome page just be a regular page?

------
par
"Tumblr was an example of how to do social media right and we can learn a lot
from it." I mean... maybe. Tumblr was also an example of maybe not pivoting
the product to cater to the community properly, as there was a lot of other
usage of Tumblr besides a strictly 'social media' use case. There was a lot of
conversation around deeper feelings, and a community around self-discovery and
self-awareness. I'm not 100% sure if Tumblr was able to properly capture that
market and position itself there.

------
csbartus
I’m still using it since 2009 everyday. For design inspiration. As a
moodboard. And still works as in the good old days.

Tumblr made me a better designer. By catching up with the latest in print and
graphic design and porting thse trends to web I had a work featured very early
in Brutalist Websites.

I use no other social network. It’s simply too much. And yes a heart is good
enough.

------
avip
Mr. Wilson's understanding of Tumblr is flawed [0]. There's a simple objective
test (now irrelevant) to tell if a platform is largely about porn or not:

[required ingredients: 1 searchable user-content platform, 1 keyboard, 1
daughter (optional)]

0\. Go to thing

1\. Open search bar

2\. Open your hand

3\. Hit keyboard with an open flat hand

4\. Enter

5\. Browse results - count how many you feel comfortable with your daughter
being portrayed in

6\. 50% is your thresh.

Tumblr was a successful porn platform. Take that off the equation and you're
left with nothing.

[0] [https://avc.com/2016/07/trashing-
tumblr/](https://avc.com/2016/07/trashing-tumblr/)

~~~
NoahTheDuke
> 5\. Browse results - count how many you feel comfortable with your daughter
> being portrayed in

My daughter can do whatever she wants. Why are you shaming sex workers?

------
hoseja
Tumblr was one of the first platforms I felt had actively _hostile_ UI/UX The
ephemeral nature of the reblog, the dashboard awfulness, the impossibility of
navigating thousands of likes/"comments"/... under a popular post. No way to,
e.g. sort followed blogs by latest post time. I felt these things could have
been easily fixed but deliberately weren't.

------
tnorthcutt
_The news hit yesterday that WordPress has purchased Tumblr_

WordPress != Automattic.

More context here: [https://poststatus.com/resources/wordpress-versus-
automattic...](https://poststatus.com/resources/wordpress-versus-automattic/)

------
aylmao
> But it is also true that Tumblr was bypassed by native mobile applications
> like Instagram and Snapchat where it was even easier to post about your
> life.

This. It's understated how much Tumblr's clunky composing hurt it as a
platform. I know people connected to Tumblr, and from what I hear there was a
lot of ideas but little direction.

There was a time when Tumblr was bigger than Instagram— Tumblr could've
focused more on making it an amazing photo-sharing service. Snapchat was/is
loved by its anonymity and ephemerality, but Tumblr was already an anonymous
social network well before it. They could've added features for ephemerality
and explored that market.

I used tumblr for consuming a lot of content, and it was great for that, but I
always thought it had potential to be better for sharing too.

~~~
markandrewj
I think you are talking about current developments, but it is worth mentioning
that when Twitter launched it was just as flip phones started to be replaced
by smartphones. Most people were interacting with the service through SMS.

To me, it felt like the progress with further developing tumblr slowed after
Marco Arment moved onto other projects.

From a historic perspective, this may an interesting article to some people.

[https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-
product?utm_source=f...](https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-
product?utm_source=feedly)

~~~
scarface74
_Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to
work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do._

Rumors are that he made $5-$7 million. But he definitely made enough to have
f%%#-you money.

------
jpm_sd
Why did they even buy it? It's been on life support for years:

[https://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-
tumblr/](https://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/)

~~~
shagie
Yahoo bought tumblr. Verizon bought Yahoo - they weren't likely specifically
after tumblr, it just game as part of the package.

------
AlexDragusin
> It is absolutely true that Yahoo! never figured out how to turn Tumblr into
> a business and ending up losing its shirt on the investment.

Given that Yahoo never figured out how to turn _search_ into a business, that
speaks volumes of their ability to connect dots.

------
SanchoPanda
I saw the headline about the sale without the buyer in it and was _sure_ that
it had to be pinboard. That would have been something.

~~~
chx
That's not what Maciej does. He is laser focused on bookmarking. That's why
his company thrives.

------
azinman2
“Tumblr was an example of how to do social media right and we can learn a lot
from it.“

Except it lost, so by definition it can’t be right.

Update: there are clearly many definitions of right. Here I’m using right in
the sense that it gets mass adoption (right in that people prefer it), and
right in the sense that it also simultaneously does net positive for the
world. Achieving both is difficult.

~~~
pmlnr
"Lost". It did not lose in term of being a better social experience. People
after pale fame and instant gratification left to chase the "i wanna be
famous", Total Drama Island style, but this has nothing to do with socially or
morally better.

------
ptest1
In 2017, Tumblr had ~400 employees. If each employee had a modest $50k
retention bonus, that’s at least an additional $20M. So I’m not sure the total
cost for the purchase as $3M- maybe that was just for the corporate assets.

------
tryitnow
Should we start entertaining the admittedly simple-minded notion that it is
not tumblr that is under-valued, but everything else is over-valued?

~~~
Mirioron
I think this is very likely. The only way I can see companies like Twitter
being worth as much as they are is their potential political power. A company
like Twitter has a lot of influence over that, but I don't think they create
such an enormous amount of value.

~~~
lowdose
It's still pretty cool everyone can engage with the United States president or
with an Elon Musk. Every user is aware of that reach.

------
philwelch
It’s easy to be sentimental about Tumblr now, but as we grow increasingly
aware of the ability for social media to create echo chambers that radicalize
people, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Tumblr is in many ways one of the worst
examples of this phenomenon. And this was no more abundantly clear than during
its porn heyday. I don’t regret the downfall of Tumblr one bit.

------
szczepano
Their next place is 404.

------
elbac
We DDOS'd Fred.

~~~
cwmma
if he still hosted his blog on tumblr he wouldn't have this problem

------
causality0
>Tumblr was a happy place and using it made people feel good about themselves.

Uh, what? Just off the top of my head I can think of people who've been
bullied on Tumblr into attempted suicide.

------
codesushi42
Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which
masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut.

There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.

~~~
uncletaco
Twitter, IMO, is _wonderful_ when you stop following journalists, politicians,
and A list celebrities. What that leaves is mostly meme makers and minor
influencers who generally wrap all the bad stuff inside of funny jokes and hot
takes.

~~~
notatoad
Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned
off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that.

I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're
following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific
tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black
twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good.

~~~
derefr
It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction.
I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated
communities, where one community can retweet something from another community
_into_ their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that
doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in
the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no
channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams
activity stream.

------
rolltiide
Diversity of decision making would still help Tumblr.

You know in which ways.

~~~
tene
I actually have no idea what you're alluding to here; can you be a bit more
explicit for us oblivious readers?

~~~
rolltiide
Sure,

The CEO of Tumblr David Karp made unilateral decisions which stifled its
growth and utility. _Any_ additional decision making input would have helped
here, but qualified women, minorities and people accompanying David, Fred (the
author of this article) and Marco (1st engineer) would have greatly helped so
the winds here. Be more in tune with the audience that grew.

After the second sale to Verizon, after David left, different leadership could
have understood how the erotic content community was flourishing on Tumblr in
ways that the erotic industry has failed to attract. Many women liked tumblr
for porn sharing, browsing, and curating because other porn-specific sites
have unclean interfaces and distracting ads. There were people that could have
told them that in the decision making process, and helped navigate the issues
encountered since that is what was driving engagement.

Automattic also seems to fail to understand this, with CEO Matt Mullenweg's
explanation seeming to complete miss the point, and looks more like a pet
project than any interest in engagement.

