OnlyFans seeks new funding and a pivot away from porn
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Pivoting away from the core reason you make money even if it's not the intended use case seems like a great way to cause the death of your company.
Why do we have to do this other thing too, instead of having a subsidiary that does that other thing?
Is it because we've vastly overestimated the power of the network effect?
Remember Qwikster?
It may be fewer users (and fewer $$), but tumblr is waaay better since the NSFW ban. And I'd even say due to it.
There are people like you describe, but it doesn't dominate the platform imo. It's easy enough to get a lot out of tumblr.
Citation needed. My impression is their MAU and time spent on site went to the floor.
According to https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-...
they've had a 30% reduction in traffic.
If that means all the weirdos with genitalia in their profile pics are gone and stop messaging me randomly (which is who actually left as far as I can tell), then good!
The remaining MAU might actually be the users they wanted to keep.
But as someone who never used tumblr for porn, I've seen no evidence that tumblr is dying for anyone other than aficionados of porn.
No, educate yourself about the "burden of proof".
But I'ma do your homework for you,
https://financesonline.com/number-of-tumblr-blogs/
"The microblogging and social media site still make money with an estimated annual revenue of $65 million."
LMAO! With 400+ employees, plus operating expenses I imagine they barely see any profit.
They have 1/10th of Facebooks MAUs in the States (according to them), yet nowhere near revenue and profit (proportionately).
Sold on 2019 for ... $3 million! https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/13/tumblr-...
But yeah, keep deluding yourselves, tumblr is doing juuuust right :D
So anyways, the tumblr that's basically the same as it was 10 years ago (unless you used it for porn), that's also still growing, is dying according to you, but not the numbers. Interesting. This is kind of like reading about your own death in the newspaper.
If their loss results in decades of free tumblr for me, all the better! I really doubt the site is gonna disappear tomorrow. And every indication so far is they aren't going to ruin it in the name of monetization.
Terminal wannabe-VC-brain is rampant around here. Contagious with PG as patient 0.
maybe if you have your business boy hat on for some reason it isn't doing fine?
I don’t know what you mean by “business boy hat” - could this be a typo?
When it comes to tumblr, I quite frankly don't give 2 shits about their advertisers. Why should I? Maybe the site will be shut down someday? You'd think that ship would've sailed.
Those metrics are literally the bread and butter of social networks.
The users that remain on tumblr seem pretty happy about the effects of the nsfw ban. The people that left due to it weren't the good ones for the most part.
Whether or not you like it now that porn is gone doesn't matter.
Why do I need to align my values of good and bad with market forces? You literally cannot make an argument that your "objective" value system about business is the only True one.
I'd bet tumblr will continue to exist and I'd get to enjoy it for free (modulo ads) for at least another half decade if not more. And I bet throughout that time the company won't do much to monetize their users beyond what they already do. The userbase has long since proven it doesn't give tumblr money beyond a stray click. But it'll continue to plug along - "failing" the whole way.
"tumblr is waaay better since the NSFW ban" and "It may be fewer users (and fewer $$)"
These don't seem to add up.
There's as much or more tumblr activity for my dashboard & on my blog. I get way fewer porn spam bots following me now. And people generally seem to be happy with the website & are continuing to use it to talk about the stuff they like.
So, to say porn might not have been what made it likeable might be true, but porn certainly was one of the big drivers of traffic.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/17378/tumblr-traffic/
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-t...
[3] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
i'm discussing the site as a product. it's a better product now, and that sentiment is pretty widespread by its engaged users. Sending the porn to other, more growth-obsessed platforms was worth it.
How long tumblr will last - i don't know. Its users are not very monetizable. But as a social media website, it is comically superior to twitter and facebook. And my argument is the exact things that cause you to say it is bad are why it is superior.
Explain to me why anything you had to say there has to do with a user's experience? The amount of content for non-nsfw didn't take a hit.
You sound like an investor trying to profit from tumblr. Not a user trying to leverage it to have a good time.
If you have 7 users Monday, make a big change on Tuesday and now on Wednesday have 4 users, which then stays the same count for years. Is that really better for your community? To stay static and not grow, as every other social media company has been doing?
Tumblr is a great example of having the right end goal (making the community safer to advertise on, thus have more revenue), but doing it in a really dumb way. Instead of killing off their well established albeit NSFW userbase, they should have been incentivizing them to post more SFW content that could have been monetized.
Instead the perception of tumblr is they were the porn social media site that banned porn and became irrelevant.
Does this argument hold up for literally anything else advertisers might not like? For example (no moral equivalency implied), if you banned X (pick one: pedophiles, nazis, kkk, racists, snuff, animal abuse, warez) because advertisers perceived your website as having an X problem, are you sure you're not a little too intensely focused on the "line goes up"?
Does the reverse hold up? If tumblr tomorrow decided they would allow X content, and they estimated 30% traffic increase, would that be good? If course not, the pool of advertisers would shrink in quality and quantity.
I assume people aren’t paying a monthly subscription to follow their favorite chicken finger company. So is OnlyFans trying to pivot into the next big social media platform? Are they trying to compete with Cameo and Patreon or are they trying to compete with Facebook/Instagram and Twitter?
I don't understand why a profitable company wants to attract this cancer.
Adult content creators are probably going to get booted off at some point for 'ad-friendliness' despite the fact that they helped build most of it.
Do we have even a single example of an Internet company that has been constant and consistently profitable over 10 years?
Tarsnap, maybe?
That probably counts as "constant" because they saturated the market completely.
I was more interested in companies that were something like "$25 million per year for the last 10-15 years and we're doing just fine thanks."
They only quit jobs when they've got the alternative lined up. And they change jobs because the compensation doesn't outweigh the crap.
When a big chunk of your company suddenly walks, that's either high crap or low compensation. And it's been ongoing because they've had time to plan their exit as a group.
The "signaling" just gave them a nice excuse.