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Bollocks. Tumblr is still around and probably has been losing money for longer than people here have been alive. No one is throwing away the kind of audience r

Bollocks. Tumblr is still around and probably has been losing money for longer than people here have been alive. No one is throwing away the kind of audience reddit has. Now the CEO might lose his job, but let's not get that twisted up with Reddit's survival.

gary_0 3y ago
Tumblr went from selling for $1B in 2013 to $3M in 2019. The brand persists but as a business it's a dismal failure. If Reddit follows that arc it will be a dismal failure as well.
- tut-urut-utut 3y ago
  Why should we care if it’s financial failure for its owners as long as it brings the same value to its users?
  - tirpen 3y ago
    If it's too much of a financial failure, it will shut down and provide zero value to its users.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Tumblr doesn't bring the same value to its users as it did before; it's basically forgotten these days, much like MySpace.
    - easyThrowaway 3y ago
      Ironically enough, tumblr is going trough some sort of "indie/lo-fi" renaissance now that Automattic bought them. I don't think they even want to go back to being an alternative to FB/Instagram/Twitter.
NovaDudely 3y ago
Brian Lunduke back in 2019 when Reddit took $150 million from Tencent basically said that Reddit would be a company in trouble with in 5 years. His argument was that it shouldn't cost that much to run the place and as such they would have to start pleasing investors and not users. The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is even more true today. Look at the amount of storage and bandwidth archive.org uses and how little money they bring in. This is not a money issue in terms of running the site.
- javier2 3y ago
  Yeah, they would probably do very well with news agency revenues, but the investors want Google/Facebook revenues.
- larksimian 3y ago
  If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged. Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible. It's way crazier that Reddit has 2k employees than that Twitter had 4k or whatever. Edited from $2/month/user to $2/year/user.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    >> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous. It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.
    - DirkH 3y ago
      This is interesting, but can you further explain how yoy get broad ranging social influence from focusing on ads? I don't quite get that.

gary_0 3y ago

Tumblr went from selling for $1B in 2013 to $3M in 2019. The brand persists but as a business it's a dismal failure. If Reddit follows that arc it will be a dismal failure as well.

tut-urut-utut 3y ago
Why should we care if it’s financial failure for its owners as long as it brings the same value to its users?
- tirpen 3y ago
  If it's too much of a financial failure, it will shut down and provide zero value to its users.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  Tumblr doesn't bring the same value to its users as it did before; it's basically forgotten these days, much like MySpace.
  - easyThrowaway 3y ago
    Ironically enough, tumblr is going trough some sort of "indie/lo-fi" renaissance now that Automattic bought them. I don't think they even want to go back to being an alternative to FB/Instagram/Twitter.

NovaDudely 3y ago

Brian Lunduke back in 2019 when Reddit took $150 million from Tencent basically said that Reddit would be a company in trouble with in 5 years. His argument was that it shouldn't cost that much to run the place and as such they would have to start pleasing investors and not users. The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is even more true today. Look at the amount of storage and bandwidth archive.org uses and how little money they bring in. This is not a money issue in terms of running the site.

javier2 3y ago
Yeah, they would probably do very well with news agency revenues, but the investors want Google/Facebook revenues.
larksimian 3y ago
If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged. Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible. It's way crazier that Reddit has 2k employees than that Twitter had 4k or whatever. Edited from $2/month/user to $2/year/user.
- itronitron 3y ago
  >> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous. It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.
  - DirkH 3y ago
    This is interesting, but can you further explain how yoy get broad ranging social influence from focusing on ads? I don't quite get that.