During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their dashboards that forthcoming legislation would destroy the service. They enabled one-cli

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.