
Tumblr’s Unclear Future - jseliger
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/theres-no-money-in-internet-culture.html
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sotojuan
I'm no entrepreneur, but I really don't think sites like Tumblr or Reddit (or
4chan) should be VC $$ backed startups or bought for a billion dollars. I've
never seen them be able to monetize past maybe their server costs.

~~~
Veratyr
How is a site like Tumblr or Reddit different from Facebook or Twitter? Those
two were able to monetize.

~~~
beaconstudios
hasn't twitter struggled to attain profitability for years?

~~~
Veratyr
They're not profitable but a lot of their expenses are capex and investment:
[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/cash-
flow?p=TWTR](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/cash-flow?p=TWTR)

In theory if they halted their investing activities they'd be profitable.

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camus2
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-
yahoo-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-deal-
layoffs.html)

Tumblr is a goner, make no mistake about it. Glad the founders could get free
money from Marissa as she didn't know what to do with yahoo's.

~~~
arkitaip
They could always buy it back for a few bucks after Verizon has utterly
destroyed it due to incompetence.

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philfrasty
$1.1 billion ... slight chance I could make the same money today by doing a
blockchain-Tumblr ICO...

~~~
taude
You'd be stuck with all that money in a crypto currency, unable to transition
it to fiat, of which that crypto will likely be worth zero in a couple years.
;)

~~~
mazamats
He's the one selling the coin...

Initial coin offering

~~~
sushid
How do you think he'll be selling the coins? He'll be charging them ETH and/or
BTC. Anyone will be able to see the wallets the coins end up in and he won't
be able to cash it out without everyone making a big fuss about it.

~~~
benchaney
He doesn't have to charge ETH or BTC, u he could just as easily charge USD.
And why would people make a fuss of he cashed out? The point of an ICO is to
fund developement, not to serve as some sort of escrow.

~~~
sushid
Are you familiar with ICOs? You don't "easily charge USD" because all of them
are held using crypto. Yes, some have used bitcoinsuisse to allow some to
preorder their slots/amount using fiat, but that's the exception, not the
norm.

Moreover charging fiat only prevents them from legally allowing US citizens to
participate whereas using the blockchain, they really only have to "warn" US
citizens that their participation is not allowed.

People have made a fuss for cashing out (e.g. Status was trying to cash out on
a sizable chunk of ETH from their ICO, which led to a lot of angry ICO
participants calling them out) in the past. It shows that they don't
fundamentally have faith in the system if they're building an ERC20 token but
they're selling ETH. No one minds them selling a bit for runway, but if you're
liquidating your entire ICO amount, it'd be a huge red flag.

Give me some counterexamples if you'd like to disagree but I'm fairly
convinced you're not too familiar with the landscape.

~~~
beager
Somewhat unrelated, I'm curious if there are documented examples of raised
coin from an ICO being laundered/tumbled.

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Grue3
If it becomes too useless to Verizon, David Karp will probably be able to buy
it back. The platform is actually way better than Twitter. It's very easy to
get posts with >100 notes even if you don't have many followers. On the other
hand on Twitter you'd be lucky to get a like if nobody knows you so it's just
shouting into the void. The blue/gold dress thing would never happen on
Twitter.

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miguelrochefort
> I think that I can buy Tumblr in 9 years for 40 dollars aka 11 million
> dollars and just make enough on t-shirts to the kids when they're 40 that
> are now 25 that were 15 years old during all those weird sites.

\- Gary Vaynerchuk

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHdzLpMg-s&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHdzLpMg-s&feature=youtu.be&t=39m47s)

~~~
jameskegel
I doubt his sincerity

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joe5150
if the latest hot "internet culture" property to come out of Tumblr is a year-
old frog meme then maybe they truly are doomed. or maybe NYMag is clueless and
nobody on staff uses the web.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd say the latter.

Even looking at most of my cow-orkers, who _do_ spend a lot of time using the
web, they're still Internet foreigners. Tourists to the web. They go
sightseeing, but they don't know the _actual_ culture. So is the case with
most of out-of-work people I know. And I imagine so is the case with most of
people employed to write _about_ the web. They don't know shit, because
they're not part of any on-line community.

~~~
matt4077
The author has a twitter account with 70k tweets, so I think that should
qualify him for shit-knowing citizenship in the "on-line" community.

~~~
intoverflow2
Yet only 6000 followers and very few of his tweets break into double figures
of likes...

Shouting 70 thousand times into a void doesn't actually make you a
participant.

~~~
reitanqild
Also isn't twitter much more about celebrity and brand worship than about
internet culture?

Or am I showing off my lack of understanding of Twitter and/or Internet
culture?

~~~
AnOscelot
No offense, but you're showing off your lack of understanding. Some people do
use Twitter to tweet at their fave celebrities, but that seems to be more of a
minority use case. It is useful to tweet directly at brands, especially when
you need product support, but again, it's a minority of uses.

In my circles, there's Weird Twitter for creativity. Political Twitter, which
is now a dominant form of medium-length blogging where the punditry is broken
up into 140 character paragraphs. Art Twitter sending out all sorts of photos
and paintings. Cute Twitter for DogRates and other forms of reporting on fuzzy
things. Twitter is still good for breaking news, and for on-the-spot
reporting. Even great for weather. I live in a stormy part of the country, and
hitting #kswx can be good on bad nights for getting reports from the people
around me.

And, of course, it's the premier way for the leader of the free world to spit
his thoughts directly at the public.

They may not have found any way to make money, but Twitter is a core part of
internet culture. It's like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, etc., that it's so big,
it can't be pinned down to just one aspect or another.

~~~
reitanqild
_No offense, but you 're showing off your lack of understanding._

No worries, I kind of expected that ;-)

That said I'll go even further and state that I have even tried to use it for
5 year plus but I still fail to enjoy it.

Guess it proves I'm hopeless at 2017 internet culture.

I used to enjoy reading web rings, make stupid web sites, use irc and run a
blog though. :-/

~~~
AnOscelot
Twitter's one of my favorite mediums. Basically everything in my second
paragraph shows up in my timeline. Feels like mainlining all the good parts of
the internet in a concentrated form. I'm also old enough to remember web rings
and all those different funky aggregators like Memepool. Twitter at its best
is like that.

I don't mean to push you into something you don't like, but if you want to
give it a go again, search for weird twitter and follow anyone who looks
interesting. Or follow your favorite authors or reporters. Over time, they'll
retweet other interesting posts and you can follow those new people.
Eventually, you'll organically build up something which follows your interests
very closely.

That's how I did it. I started because I wanted to follow the Arab Spring and
Tahrir Square events closely, and many Egyptians were posting their accounts
on Twitter in English.

~~~
reitanqild
What client should I use then?

~~~
tkxxx7
I recommend Echofon for mobile (I think it's $4 USD, but there's a free/ad
version). First class list support that lets you essentially have multiple
timelines. Easy to log into and switch between multiple accounts. less buggy
than any client I've used and made me throw away Tweetdeck and others.

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spcelzrd
The link highlighting on that page is bonkers. Not sure I trust what nymag.com
is saying about internet culture.

Also: "It’s tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too
young to have a steady income."

Really?

~~~
epicide
In context, it reads more like ""It’s tough to [sell premium features/content]
when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income."

While they don't provide any evidence to support this, I can kind of see that
argument. Biggest example I can think of is YouTube Red.

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nextstep
Interesting that this article avoids any mention of Snapchat which seems to be
header toward a similar fate as Tumblr/Twitter/etc.

~~~
beager
Good call. IMO Snapchat suffers from the same issues of having little to
profile users on and an unintuitive medium to sell advertising into. Even more
interestingly, they're in that Twitter-esque post-IPO tumult where corrective
forces could potentially cut down a lot more value.

