7 ms·

How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo

44 points by awwstn 11y ago

pussinboots 11y ago
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
- Avshalom 11y ago
  I thought tumblr had actually cracked into profitability for a bit before it got bought.
  - tacos 11y ago
    "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-intolerable-revenue-lightness-of-tumblr http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/20/the-int...
- oddevan 11y ago
  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.
  - tacos 11y ago
    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.
    - oddevan 11y ago
      > 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).
      - jkaunisv1 11y ago
        Watermarking images with a name and url is a common practice to help mitigate that problem.
- harryf 11y ago
  > 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-internet http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-... > The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation.
- fivesigma 11y ago
  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?
  - hobs 11y ago
    The same reason so many other websites decide to waste so much real estate: phones. edit: also being lazy.
    - fivesigma 11y ago
      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
  - oddevan 11y ago
    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.
  - jkaunisv1 11y ago
    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 :)
discardorama 11y ago
Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html It's a bit dated but relevant. 2 steps must be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo: 1. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers 2. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.
- nahname 11y ago
  >The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup." A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.
  - seivan 11y ago
    The desire never goes away, it just gets invested in side-projects that end up in graveyards because of work fatigue.
  - mrtron 11y ago
    You should visit the Tumblr offices. Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr
- geoffreykeating 11y ago
  That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear : )
  - guiomie 11y ago
    Not sure why you got downvoted. I like his ending statement: "Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
pinaceae 11y ago
not sure the author understands the magnitudes of money at play here. tumblr is a blip in yahoo world. on its own its a niche, nothing more. beloved by some, sure, but nowhere near the stuff that would be needed to turn around yahoo.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  That was my initial thought as well. I looked through the 10k but they only break out revenues by Yahoo-owned/affiliate rather than individual Yahoo products. Can you cite any sources to back up this claim?
- emsy 11y ago
  I agree, as a Tumblr outsider I'm under the impression that Tumblr's (community) importance is mainly self importance.
  - pluma 11y ago
    There seem to be three things to tumblr: 1. porn (although it is no longer discoverable via tags because tag search no longer shows 18+ content) 2. radical feminists (e.g. TERFs and misandrists), "trans" folk (of the camgirl/"trap" variety), otherkin and furries [0] 3. everything else [1] It's the second group that gives tumblr its reputation. The third group is evidently there but 1 and 2 are why we can't have nice things (unless you consider masturbation -- physical or intellectual -- "nice things"). [0]: including radfems who hate trans people; trans people who hate otherkin[2]; otherkin who hate furries[3]; and furries who hate everyone; but there are strange overlaps at the younger end of the spectrum [1]: including serious feminists and sane trans people, basically perfectly ordinary people you can have a conversation with [2]: if you haven't heard the term before: otherkin are basically people pretending to be something other than human (e.g. animals, or even dragons). [3]: just don't ask. Serious furries make otherkin look sane.
tacos 11y ago
During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their dashboards that forthcoming legislation would destroy the service. They enabled one-click to contact your representative. It generated 87,000 calls. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing At the time, I remember seeing HN jumping up and down about how great this was. I was excited too, because now I had hard data of a 0.29% response rate. Tumblr as a business died that day. It doesn't matter how many users you have or what their demographic is if you haven't created a culture of commerce. In the absence of revenue, "rope in millions of users and then reap the profits" seems to scale to about three people profiting per transaction. 2013: "Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on their own pages." It's 2016 and Tumblr still shows zero revenue on Yahoo's balance sheet.
hbbio 11y ago
I appreciate this post being on Medium.
pkaler 11y ago
The way to save Yahoo is for Yahoo to kill Yahoo. Tumblr is in New York. Away from Sunnyvale. Yahoo could build a new Yahoo there that was comprised of small teams, making new products, shipping on a regular cadence, shielded from the mothership. When the original Macintosh was created, the team was in a new building away from the Apple II team. Yahoo needs to find its own pirate flag to fly.
- cobookman 11y ago
  When I worked at yahoo I suggested this idea. Take yahoo as we know it today, silo it off and give it just enough resources to keep it alive. Then with the massive cash reserves & rest of the employees start experimenting new products that are not under the yahoo name, but get media exposure from Yahoo. If one of them is successful make that the new yahoo. Sadly, It was not taken over well. If I were an executive I'm not sure I'd also risk my lucrative salary either. I'm also pretty sure the shareholders would not appreciate us burning potentially billions of dollars if this plan failed. So I totally get where management has gone. Its just sad as yahoo never really got a fighting chance.
theOnliest 11y ago
Tumblr has recently (actually, not so recently any more) disabled commenting on their platform. My partner is part of a relatively close running community that used to use Tumblr to connect with others, give/receive encouragement about their runs, and so on. Since they disabled comments (with some half-hearted promise about bringing them back, well, sometime) hardly any of her friends post any more. Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging) seems ill-advised.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  This is a problem. Tumblr the Community are at the mercy of Tumblr/Yahoo the Corporation. My partner is also a user of Tumblr, and according to her much of the community are dissatisfied with the direction the company is heading. Actually, now that I think about it, the strategies outlined in this article are more likely to strangle both Tumblr and Yahoo than save either of them. I'm almost tempted to start working on the-next-tumblr and see if it's possible to tempt all those users over to a platform better suited for their needs.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Very interesting to me, because I'm working on a personal essy/reflective article about 'communities' online relating to message boards vs. commenting system. I never was a Tumblr user so I've got a quick question - were they using an in-house type commenting system or something like Disqus? Thanks for sharing the info about that change in context of this, it's helpful.
  - theOnliest 11y ago
    They were using an in-house thing; some blogs also have Disqus comments enabled but nobody really uses them, as far as I can tell. (Even when they did, they were outside the stream of native Tumblr replies, and didn't show up in users' dashboards.)
    - 6stringmerc 11y ago
dotcoma 11y ago
A company that can be 'saved' by Tumblr is in serious trouble indeed.
mattkevan 11y ago
Tumblr save Yahoo? Wow. The other day I logged into Tumblr for the first time in ages, and there was a HTML5 animation thing in the background which completely froze Safari on my recent MBP. Completely unusable, even with the fans spinning so hard I thought the thing was going to take off.
awl130 11y ago
Yahoo is a farce. Ostensibly it is a kind of passive index fund that only holds two assets: Alibaba and Yahoo, which is rapidly declining in value and should be cashflowed out (remove overhead, no add'l investment and collect cash til it dies--or sold to a PE fund that will do that). Typical passive fund managers earn their fee 2%/20% by re-balancing their portfolio as needed to approximate the index. Yahoo is not even doing that. so in fact they are more like a pass through or shell entity that holds one asset, usually for tax advantageous reasons. thus the managers (yahoo management) should get some nominal fee comparable to a clearinghouse. Marissa Meyer earns $20mm per year for running a shell company. that's like paying your agent in the cayman islands $20mm per year merely to file the paperwork to remain incorporated there. what a fucking farce.

44 points by awwstn 11y ago

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

Avshalom 11y ago
I thought tumblr had actually cracked into profitability for a bit before it got bought.
- tacos 11y ago
  "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-intolerable-revenue-lightness-of-tumblr http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/20/the-int...
oddevan 11y ago
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.
- tacos 11y ago
  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.
  - oddevan 11y ago
    > 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).
    - jkaunisv1 11y ago
      Watermarking images with a name and url is a common practice to help mitigate that problem.
harryf 11y ago
> 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-internet http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-... > The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation.
fivesigma 11y ago
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?
- hobs 11y ago
  The same reason so many other websites decide to waste so much real estate: phones. edit: also being lazy.
  - fivesigma 11y ago
    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
- oddevan 11y ago
  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.
- jkaunisv1 11y ago
  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 :)

discardorama 11y ago

Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html It's a bit dated but relevant. 2 steps must be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo: 1. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers 2. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.

nahname 11y ago
>The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup." A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.
- seivan 11y ago
  The desire never goes away, it just gets invested in side-projects that end up in graveyards because of work fatigue.
- mrtron 11y ago
  You should visit the Tumblr offices. Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr
geoffreykeating 11y ago
That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear : )
- guiomie 11y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted. I like his ending statement: "Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

pinaceae 11y ago

not sure the author understands the magnitudes of money at play here. tumblr is a blip in yahoo world. on its own its a niche, nothing more. beloved by some, sure, but nowhere near the stuff that would be needed to turn around yahoo.

roymurdock 11y ago
That was my initial thought as well. I looked through the 10k but they only break out revenues by Yahoo-owned/affiliate rather than individual Yahoo products. Can you cite any sources to back up this claim?
emsy 11y ago
I agree, as a Tumblr outsider I'm under the impression that Tumblr's (community) importance is mainly self importance.
- pluma 11y ago
  There seem to be three things to tumblr: 1. porn (although it is no longer discoverable via tags because tag search no longer shows 18+ content) 2. radical feminists (e.g. TERFs and misandrists), "trans" folk (of the camgirl/"trap" variety), otherkin and furries [0] 3. everything else [1] It's the second group that gives tumblr its reputation. The third group is evidently there but 1 and 2 are why we can't have nice things (unless you consider masturbation -- physical or intellectual -- "nice things"). [0]: including radfems who hate trans people; trans people who hate otherkin[2]; otherkin who hate furries[3]; and furries who hate everyone; but there are strange overlaps at the younger end of the spectrum [1]: including serious feminists and sane trans people, basically perfectly ordinary people you can have a conversation with [2]: if you haven't heard the term before: otherkin are basically people pretending to be something other than human (e.g. animals, or even dragons). [3]: just don't ask. Serious furries make otherkin look sane.

tacos 11y ago

During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their dashboards that forthcoming legislation would destroy the service. They enabled one-click to contact your representative. It generated 87,000 calls. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing At the time, I remember seeing HN jumping up and down about how great this was. I was excited too, because now I had hard data of a 0.29% response rate. Tumblr as a business died that day. It doesn't matter how many users you have or what their demographic is if you haven't created a culture of commerce. In the absence of revenue, "rope in millions of users and then reap the profits" seems to scale to about three people profiting per transaction. 2013: "Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on their own pages." It's 2016 and Tumblr still shows zero revenue on Yahoo's balance sheet.

hbbio 11y ago

I appreciate this post being on Medium.

pkaler 11y ago

The way to save Yahoo is for Yahoo to kill Yahoo. Tumblr is in New York. Away from Sunnyvale. Yahoo could build a new Yahoo there that was comprised of small teams, making new products, shipping on a regular cadence, shielded from the mothership. When the original Macintosh was created, the team was in a new building away from the Apple II team. Yahoo needs to find its own pirate flag to fly.

cobookman 11y ago
When I worked at yahoo I suggested this idea. Take yahoo as we know it today, silo it off and give it just enough resources to keep it alive. Then with the massive cash reserves & rest of the employees start experimenting new products that are not under the yahoo name, but get media exposure from Yahoo. If one of them is successful make that the new yahoo. Sadly, It was not taken over well. If I were an executive I'm not sure I'd also risk my lucrative salary either. I'm also pretty sure the shareholders would not appreciate us burning potentially billions of dollars if this plan failed. So I totally get where management has gone. Its just sad as yahoo never really got a fighting chance.

theOnliest 11y ago

Tumblr has recently (actually, not so recently any more) disabled commenting on their platform. My partner is part of a relatively close running community that used to use Tumblr to connect with others, give/receive encouragement about their runs, and so on. Since they disabled comments (with some half-hearted promise about bringing them back, well, sometime) hardly any of her friends post any more. Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging) seems ill-advised.

s_kilk 11y ago
This is a problem. Tumblr the Community are at the mercy of Tumblr/Yahoo the Corporation. My partner is also a user of Tumblr, and according to her much of the community are dissatisfied with the direction the company is heading. Actually, now that I think about it, the strategies outlined in this article are more likely to strangle both Tumblr and Yahoo than save either of them. I'm almost tempted to start working on the-next-tumblr and see if it's possible to tempt all those users over to a platform better suited for their needs.
6stringmerc 11y ago
Very interesting to me, because I'm working on a personal essy/reflective article about 'communities' online relating to message boards vs. commenting system. I never was a Tumblr user so I've got a quick question - were they using an in-house type commenting system or something like Disqus? Thanks for sharing the info about that change in context of this, it's helpful.
- theOnliest 11y ago
  They were using an in-house thing; some blogs also have Disqus comments enabled but nobody really uses them, as far as I can tell. (Even when they did, they were outside the stream of native Tumblr replies, and didn't show up in users' dashboards.)
  - 6stringmerc 11y ago

dotcoma 11y ago

A company that can be 'saved' by Tumblr is in serious trouble indeed.

mattkevan 11y ago

Tumblr save Yahoo? Wow. The other day I logged into Tumblr for the first time in ages, and there was a HTML5 animation thing in the background which completely froze Safari on my recent MBP. Completely unusable, even with the fans spinning so hard I thought the thing was going to take off.

awl130 11y ago

Yahoo is a farce. Ostensibly it is a kind of passive index fund that only holds two assets: Alibaba and Yahoo, which is rapidly declining in value and should be cashflowed out (remove overhead, no add'l investment and collect cash til it dies--or sold to a PE fund that will do that). Typical passive fund managers earn their fee 2%/20% by re-balancing their portfolio as needed to approximate the index. Yahoo is not even doing that. so in fact they are more like a pass through or shell entity that holds one asset, usually for tax advantageous reasons. thus the managers (yahoo management) should get some nominal fee comparable to a clearinghouse. Marissa Meyer earns $20mm per year for running a shell company. that's like paying your agent in the cayman islands $20mm per year merely to file the paperwork to remain incorporated there. what a fucking farce.