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Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money?
- jarin 15y agoI believe I saw something about Posterous adding affiliate codes to links unless you already have one on there.
- dropshopsa 15y agoCan this generate enough revenue to run the service?
- jarin 15y agoI don't think so, but I also know that judicious use of caching and Amazon S3 can keep your costs relatively low.
- salemh 15y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309403 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309403 "Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links"
- daydream 15y agoSerious question: do they?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- foos 15y agoYep: http://mixergy.com/woothemes-adriaan-pienaar/ http://mixergy.com/woothemes-adriaan-pienaar/
- evertonfuller 15y agoI wonder how file hosting sites make money. Especially those without ads. /threadjacker
- just_testing 15y agoThose with ads (like 4shared and megaupload) get money from annoyingly trying to get you to subscribe to get pirated content. Yes, megavideo, I am looking at your 72-minutes limit. About those without ads, probably their business model is to trying to get you to subscribe, by being less annoying than those without ads.
- e-dard 15y agoI don't think Tumblr are making money at the moment. I mean, they might sell themes but that's hardly going to come close to their outgoings. I guess they're working on the revenue generating bit, as seems to be the case for so many funded tech companies over the last few years.
- ivanbernat 15y agoThey are making money but probably not much. David once said they would probably make millions if they put a single AdSense banner in the Dashboard, but they refuse to use regular advertising and want to make a more creative way of making money. (Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/22/founder-stories-karp-tumblr-making-money/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/22/founder-stories-karp-tumblr...)
- duck 15y agoWith how terrible the Tumblr service has been the past year (I finally had to move every site I had off of it) I often wonder if they are making money. I had read somewhere they make pretty good on the themes and "feature" piece, but not sure how that could amount to very much.
- geekfactor 15y agoI've included links to a few relevant Quora threads here: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-than-premium-themes http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-... http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e-g-Blogger-Tumblr-WordPress-make-money http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e... http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blogging-platform-provider-(e.g.-Tumblr-Posterous-etc.) http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blo... There is surprisingly little detail here, though, possibly suggesting that the companies haven't quite figured it out yet!
- dropshopsa 15y agoThis is a nice comment from one of your links: Luis Felipe Lanz, Intrapreneur, software architect, tec... In my humble opinion, Posterous seems to be following the same strategy than Foursquare, Twitter or even Quora, start for free until get a consolided installed base users, then start side business around publicity.
- cageface 15y agoThat sounds uncomfortably familiar to us veterans of the '99 crash.
- mattslight 15y agountil adwords, what was the Google business model?
- william42 15y agoWasn't it «being part of Stanford» originally?
- dropshopsa 15y agoAccording to Techsmart Posterious a Funding:$5.14M! There has to be some brains behind it somewhere. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/posterous http://www.crunchbase.com/company/posterous
- dropshopsa 15y agoTumbler 40.3M! http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tumblr http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tumblr
- nhangen 15y agoI don't know why they won't use nice looking ads from sites like Carbon or The Deck, which IMO add value rather than take away. I just read that Tumblr has passed WordPress in terms of # of installed blogs, but I believe Matt's company makes tons more cash. Very interesting too, considering WP is OS.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoWordpress has also enabled lots of developers to make tons of money through templates and plugins. For example, woothemes makes millions/year selling wordpress templates.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoIf they could fetch $1 cpm and sell their entire inventory they could pull $1M/day. Correction: $1M every four days http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/tumblr-pageviews-a-day/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/tumblr-pageviews-a-day/
- lurchpop 15y agothey borrow it
- dpcan 15y agoPersonally, I think if they just offered premium themes at a fair price they would make a killing.
- kristofferR 15y agoPosterous: Add affiliate links, special marketing deals with brands Tumblr: Premium themes, featured directory listings, "digital stickers" They could probably earn a lot more if they started with ads or premium accounts. Right now it looks like they're focused on acquiring users, the focus on profits will likely come later.
- cmelbye 15y agoTwo of Tumblr's three sources of revenue (featured directory listings and digital stickers to put on directory listings) are no longer after they ditched the old directory system a few months ago in favor of a curated one.
- jroes 15y agoFor Posterous, custom domains are $13 (or maybe $25, the custom domain signup page is a little confusing) if you register through them. There's a fair amount of markup there.