Tumblr’s Unclear Future | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr’s Unclear Future

nymag.com

71 pointsjseliger60 comments

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.

Wasn't tumblr bought for literally a billion dollars?

It was, I wonder what the ROI looks like today on that investment.

Yahoo wrote down around $700M of the investment. In other words, Yahoo has stated publicly to shareholders that Tumblr is only worth $300M.

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

In the age of pretty much unlimited ad inventory and user ad blindness your only hope to improve click-through is (a) to know your user and (b) be able to grab their attention in a consistent manner, preferably several times a day. Not sure how Tumblr executed on either, most of my visits there were logged-out referred through some other sites.

hasn't twitter struggled to attain profitability for years?

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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-...

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.

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

Mayer knew exactly what to do with Yahoo: convert it into money. That's what people wanted and that's what she did.

There's no mention of Tumblr in that article, and 2100 people constitutes a large number but ultimately a low percentage of the folks who work for Yahoo and for all its subsidiaries.

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

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. ;)

He's the one selling the coin...

Initial coin offering

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.

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.

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.

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

You might infer such a valuation on an ICO with a coin that is tenuously that valuable, but 1.1b for Tumblr was an outright acquisition, cold cash.

You could probably claim a value of 1.1b on any hackneyed scam via ICO, but the issues with that eclipse any meaningful discussion we could have about Tumblr as an idea or viable business in 2017.

Hello :-) Could I just ask what ICO stands for? Thanks

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/digital-c...

Initial Coin Offering.

The IPO of a cryptocurrency, more or less.

"Initial Coin Offering", a way to crowd fund with cryptocurrency.

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.

> 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...

I doubt his sincerity

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.

Nobody is clueless for supposedly not knowing every Tumblr meme out there. If you have anything worthwhile to say, please refer to the actual content of this article.

His comment was pertinent; please, take about 20% off her, there.

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.

There is no such thing as actual internet culture, just as there is no such thing as single human culture. Different communities have different cultures and none of them is any less real.

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.

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.

I think he spotted you https://twitter.com/bafeldman/status/880405704510713857

The median Twitter user has what, a couple hundred followers? They certainly don't have 6,000. An account with that many isn't hugely famous, but it's certainly doing better than most.

That's assuming they weren't paid for. Someone narcissistic enough to blast out 70K tweets is likely to pursue all avenues to inflate their self-worth.

I’m a long-time Brian Feldman fan and I can assure you he has a vast knowledge of internet culture. He wrote one of the most comprehensive pieces on Minion memes.

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?

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.

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. :-/

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.

What client should I use then?

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.

No, not at all. Though I think that's what most of HN believes, strangely.

Everyone fucking hates this term, but Google "Weird Twitter" for one of Twitter's many significant organic communities.

Though I think that's what most of HN believes, strangely.

Weird how different we perceive things: For me I always thought HN adored twitter and only I and a few others cried out loud against what I perceived as the naked emperor.

I try to be open to see where I'm wrong though and I might be about to change my rating to same rating as Mac OS: "probably great but doesn't work for me."

That's the impression you get from Twitter if you read newspaper articles about it, but once you start using it you find these other communities.

Here are two, but there are many others:

#OTalk - occupational therapists (mostly in the UK) have a discussion every Tuesday evening.

#TwitterDisco - people share music they love.

The fact that you think this means anything says it all

I've never used Tumblr as a platform for memery (4chan seems more suited) but there are some great blogs with amazing art, and other cool subject matter (Fuck Yeah Brutalism immediately comes to mind).

Agreed! Tumblr certain has a more casual feeling in some of its circles, but every once in a while you find some great blogs that are taking advantage of tumblr's accessibility to put out nice content.

Why is it relevant what meme came out from Tumblr? If we are doing meme based valuations, then 4chan is a trillion dollar company.

Thankfully that did not originate there. Tumblr is notorious for being left-leaning (and may I add, sometimes it's excessive)

(except for the part where it's filled with scantly-clad people)

OK, gonna put my internet nerd hat on. That frog has been around 2008, when a 4chan user uploaded part of a 2005 comic by Matt Furie[1]. Then it was photoshopped around to its various moods and forms and a couple of years ago hit the mainstream.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1148

To put on my own nerd hat, the author is referencing "dat boi" as in "oh shit here come dat boi!" — not Pepe. Both are frog-related memes, but dat boi is much more recent and did originate on Tumblr, even if its final form may have actually come into fruition on Facebook — though Know Your Meme can be wildly inaccurate at times.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-boi

Ah got it, now I'm a bit embarrassed. I didn't even know that existed until a few weeks ago (a sign that I'm getting old?). Thanks for the clarification.

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?

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.

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

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.

Snapchat is a public facing company with clear revenues way way more than tumblr.

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