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Comment by pussinboots | Hacker News Reader

while i agree that unifying the yahoo-tumblr experience is a good direction, it won't save yahoo. the problem with both twitter and tumblr is that advertising within the content platform is ineffective and does not generate enough revenue

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I'd argue that a large portion of that is ineffective ads. There have been a large number of ads for a free-to-play "choose your own adventure" game, and they are frequently reblogged and mocked. (Might explain why non-rebloggable ads are suddenly showing up in my feed!)

Users already follow tumblr blogs that cater to their interests. Tumblr already knows I follow a Pokémon-themed blog, a How To Train Your Dragon-themed blog, and the official blogs for Instapaper and Apple Music. And Taylor Swift.

Based on those interests, Tumblr should be able to sell ads for, say, the new Pokémon mobile game or Taylor Swift's new concert film (premiering on Apple Music), or whatever. It shouldn't matter whether or not I click or do anything actionable on those ads; what matters is that I see them. It's like television ads in that respect: you're paying to get your message out to a group of people.

So yes, tumblr advertising is currently quite ineffective. But it doesn't have to be.

I once spotted an Etsy card on Tumblr. 7,000+ reblogs. A month later the $3 card was still available. I contacted the artist asking about it. "If I had a nickel..." she said.

Tumblr's just not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff. If it doesn't work organically it's not going to work when you bring corporate ads in. Yahoo bought it for display ad inventory and then, oops, the bottom dropped out of display ads.

> Tumblr's just not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff.

I'll agree that the largest part of tumblr's userbase doesn't have the ability to whip out the credit card at the drop of a hat. I'll argue that TV is also not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff, yet display ads seem to be working there.

I'll also add some sympathy for that Etsy seller. I have a friend with an Etsy shop, and the bane of her existence is people reblogging a card or print with no link back (or worse, "google images" listed as the source).

Watermarking images with a name and url is a common practice to help mitigate that problem.

Who would've thought that blog posts about the evil patriarchy cannot generate enough revenue.

Also the fact that tumblr blogs look like they came straight out of 2006. We have mainstream 24-27inch screens with 1920 horizontal pixels now. Why do most tumblr blogs look like geocities-era thin vertical strips of annoying gifs filled with tiny blocks of hard to read text?

The same reason so many other websites decide to waste so much real estate: phones.

edit: also being lazy.

I guess they were unable to grok responsive design CSS practices, even at a $1b valuation.

Case in point of some people who get it: medium.com

Because Tumblr, for a large part of its audience, fills the geocities-era niche of self-expression. The majority of tumblr bloggers don't care about 1920-pixel screens, they care about the colors and the aesthetic, web design principles be damned.

A lot of Tumblr users are artists, students, and teenagers. You may think 24" screens are the norm but a lot of these people are on crummy laptops or phones.

To use a Tumblr-relevant phrase with tongue only slightly in cheek: check your privilege :)

> while i agree that unifying the yahoo-tumblr experience is a good direction

That's what happened to Flickr... see http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-...

> The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation.

I thought tumblr had actually cracked into profitability for a bit before it got bought.

"So Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for a company that made $14 million in revenue last year. It took Tumblr five years to generate as much annual revenue as a moderately well-managed New York deli." http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/20/the-int...

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