3 ms·

This reminded me of both the amazingness of the culture of Tumblr and a lot of the reasons about why I left. I could create useful, informative, viral things th

This reminded me of both the amazingness of the culture of Tumblr and a lot of the reasons about why I left. I could create useful, informative, viral things there, but there was no way I could make a decent amount of income on the large amount of work I was putting in. I never went so far as to do any of the things mentioned in here—no raspberry ketone treatments ever came from ShortFormBlog—but the closest I got was a one-time sponsored post deal I did with Federated Media. That was nice—and the advertiser was also legitimate and high-profile—but it was just a one-time thing. By choosing for years not to do anything to help creators make money off their websites, Tumblr created a situation where some of their best users did questionable things just to make money from their websites. It's too bad—had Tumblr been more decisive, it could have been a YouTube-type situation—allowing both them and their users to make lasting revenue.

wyclif 11y ago
If your goal is to make money, you're much better off with a blog where you own the content than you are with Tumblr.
- shortformblog 11y ago
  One thing I'll say is that on Tumblr, you don't give up ownership of the content, you just give them the right to reproduce it anywhere. So you don't lose ownership; you allow virality. But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience. Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.) But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that. My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me, but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead things that make sense as creative projects.

wyclif 11y ago

If your goal is to make money, you're much better off with a blog where you own the content than you are with Tumblr.

shortformblog 11y ago
One thing I'll say is that on Tumblr, you don't give up ownership of the content, you just give them the right to reproduce it anywhere. So you don't lose ownership; you allow virality. But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience. Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.) But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that. My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me, but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead things that make sense as creative projects.