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From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO: > Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30

From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO: > Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make. > So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things. Tumblr’s monetization strategy since the Automattic acquisition has been “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.” Which is kind of your only option when the Tumblr user-base is actively hostile towards monetization attempts. Tumblr tried a “Tumblr Post Plus” Patreon-like subscription thing, and the creator that they enrolled in the test got so much hate they cancelled it before it fully launched. I could list the monetization strategies they’ve tried but there are too many. Merch, tipping, promoting your own posts, cosmetic check marks after your username, crabs, promoting other people’s posts, lore behind the merch store, a “Luffy” tab on the top of the page (in between “Following” and “For You”) (I think was a Netflix promo). At one point they were running ads for Tumblr on Tumblr. I should make a post describing them all.

swagempire 3y ago
Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no? This always seems like a really bad idea.
- citruscomputing 3y ago
  They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for, nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.
  - skupig 3y ago
    Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff other large free sites do. I think they probably could have put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the site because we all know they're trying to wring money out of their users and the enshittification has begun. It doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.
  - Alex3917 3y ago
    > normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)
    - citruscomputing 3y ago
      Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why didn't staff even acknowledge there's a problem?
      - Alex3917 3y ago
        No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.
        sn41 3y ago
        Hi, just to sate my own curiosity: can you please provide me a link to this presentation, if it's available online? Thanks...
- sneak 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - n8cpdx 3y ago
    No it wasn’t. Instead of deleting the porn they could have just hid it from iOS users. Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Chrome, and countless other App Store apps are perfectly comfortable serving up racey content.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Those are too big to fail. Nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn’t have Instagram. 500px is another example of a site full of nudity that has to arbitrarily censor for iOS, all because Apple is protecting their 10x-market-rate credit card processing business (30% instead of 3%) by preventing sideloading. It’s bullshit that Apple decides for me what I am allowed to view. How convenient that it also protects their revenue stream.
      - n8cpdx 3y ago
        I think you might be forgetting that Tumblr had a completely fine status quo, including showing me very much adult content on my iPhone, until Verizon bought them. Blaming the App Store was always an excuse. Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site. https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-starting-on-dec-17 https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-startin... Some would say it is disappointing that Apple draws the line at child sexual abuse, but I guess that is a matter of opinion.
        evanelias 3y ago
        What you've said above is completely incorrect, and as a former Tumblr employee I find it deeply offensive. Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.
- notatoad 3y ago
  that was a long time ago, under a previous owner. Automattic has seemingly tried to be a good steward of the tumblr brand, but it seems like at this point, the only people left using tumblr are unmonetizable. the bad idea was buying tumblr. but i think automattic knew that when they bought it, and just thought it would be fun to set some money on fire for a while.
- underseacables 3y ago
  They did that because a lot of the people creating and posting that Content were kids…
  - callalex 3y ago
    How did you quantify that?
- raincole 3y ago
  Reddit-fuck-up is not even remotely comparable to Tumblr-fuck-up. What Tumblr did was more like if Reddit banned edgy memes.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? No, they did that years ago (getting on for literally 10 years ago), and that's what ultimately resulted in selling it to its current owners for like 1/1000th of what Yahoo paid for it.
mvdtnz 3y ago
Things are pretty grim when you're asking your own staff to purchase merch because "every little bit helps".
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  This was live-streamed publicly and advertised to users. I didn’t make that very clear.
echelon 3y ago
The lesson: "Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and embraces it." Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated content behind the curtains.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The lesson is that user generated content shouldn't be turned into an algorithmic amusement park for advertisers and data brokers. Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at squeezing money out of it.
- starcraft2wol 3y ago
  Aren’t left leaning people all about “ethical porn” and power dynamics now?
- hobo_mark 3y ago
  It looks like all the left-leaning porn posters have moved to BlueSky (to the point the main feed was unusable, last I checked).
Spivak 3y ago
This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are. Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol and there's not much value to add over the base experience. Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-licensing Terraform. And worse is that sometimes creating true value-adds naturally perverts incentives. Like for example a true value-add would be "bubble-as-a-service" because Tumblr has some really nasty subcultures which is why posters don't like when posts "break containment." It would be the easiest money ever to just pay and get a huge blocklist without having to go through the effort of making one yourself but then you kinda need those nasty communities to justify the value.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  From the CEO’s blog today: > You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    I think we're saying the same thing, they're successful in the sense that Tumblr users like them but they're small potatoes. Tumblr users aren't necessarily allergic to monetization but the ones they've found don't pay the bills.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    (person who doesn't really know what they're talking about when it comes to services of this scale asking) Why does Tumblr need 1000 servers to run? You can serve a lot of text and relatively well compressed image files with not a lot of hardware.
    - 3y ago
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> the monetization strategies they’ve tried ... crabs Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health insurance or...?
- tg16 3y ago
  A virtual pet that lives on your blog and occasionally tries to eat your mouse cursor.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throw932490 3y ago
There is very simple monetization strategy: ads, cut bloat, move content moderation staff to India! Tumblr has an army of content creator that work for free. It is a site that host text and images. How they even spend 30 million per year? Maybe on organizing "stuff convention", SF real estate and so on... Cut the bloat!
- mpixel 3y ago
  They don't spend 30 million per year, they spend 30 million over what they generate. I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.
  - throw932490 3y ago
    > they spend 30 million over what they generate That is my point. I do not understand how they total costs can be over 30M. It is mostly static content that begs for CDN cache. It is also not mission critical.
    - crummy 3y ago
      Probably they do a lot of content moderation, which takes human beings at least at some stage.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
They don't seem to have tried the one thing that might have worked for them, namely, embracing the fact that they're first and foremost a porn site. Instead, they decided to be actively hostile to this reality, with predictable results.
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  Different owner
  - stevenicr 3y ago
    yes, and even though the newish owner has not banned all things naughty that would get flagged at fbk or similar, they still have banned and removed profiles that had erotic content. It's fine to do what they want, but it's become a slightly naughtier pg-13 - I guess nc-17. So those who want naughtier are going elsewhere, and no one knows for sure what is okay and what could be okay today and get your account removed tomorrow - so why put any content into it?

swagempire 3y ago

Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no? This always seems like a really bad idea.

citruscomputing 3y ago
They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for, nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.
- skupig 3y ago
  Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff other large free sites do. I think they probably could have put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the site because we all know they're trying to wring money out of their users and the enshittification has begun. It doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.
- Alex3917 3y ago
  > normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)
  - citruscomputing 3y ago
    Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why didn't staff even acknowledge there's a problem?
    - Alex3917 3y ago
      No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.
      - sn41 3y ago
        Hi, just to sate my own curiosity: can you please provide me a link to this presentation, if it's available online? Thanks...
sneak 3y ago
[flagged]
- n8cpdx 3y ago
  No it wasn’t. Instead of deleting the porn they could have just hid it from iOS users. Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Chrome, and countless other App Store apps are perfectly comfortable serving up racey content.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Those are too big to fail. Nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn’t have Instagram. 500px is another example of a site full of nudity that has to arbitrarily censor for iOS, all because Apple is protecting their 10x-market-rate credit card processing business (30% instead of 3%) by preventing sideloading. It’s bullshit that Apple decides for me what I am allowed to view. How convenient that it also protects their revenue stream.
    - n8cpdx 3y ago
      I think you might be forgetting that Tumblr had a completely fine status quo, including showing me very much adult content on my iPhone, until Verizon bought them. Blaming the App Store was always an excuse. Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site. https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-starting-on-dec-17 https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-startin... Some would say it is disappointing that Apple draws the line at child sexual abuse, but I guess that is a matter of opinion.
      - evanelias 3y ago
        What you've said above is completely incorrect, and as a former Tumblr employee I find it deeply offensive. Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.
notatoad 3y ago
that was a long time ago, under a previous owner. Automattic has seemingly tried to be a good steward of the tumblr brand, but it seems like at this point, the only people left using tumblr are unmonetizable. the bad idea was buying tumblr. but i think automattic knew that when they bought it, and just thought it would be fun to set some money on fire for a while.
underseacables 3y ago
They did that because a lot of the people creating and posting that Content were kids…
- callalex 3y ago
  How did you quantify that?
raincole 3y ago
Reddit-fuck-up is not even remotely comparable to Tumblr-fuck-up. What Tumblr did was more like if Reddit banned edgy memes.
lmm 3y ago
> Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? No, they did that years ago (getting on for literally 10 years ago), and that's what ultimately resulted in selling it to its current owners for like 1/1000th of what Yahoo paid for it.

mvdtnz 3y ago

Things are pretty grim when you're asking your own staff to purchase merch because "every little bit helps".

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
This was live-streamed publicly and advertised to users. I didn’t make that very clear.

echelon 3y ago

The lesson: "Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and embraces it." Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated content behind the curtains.

rchaud 3y ago
The lesson is that user generated content shouldn't be turned into an algorithmic amusement park for advertisers and data brokers. Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at squeezing money out of it.
starcraft2wol 3y ago
Aren’t left leaning people all about “ethical porn” and power dynamics now?
hobo_mark 3y ago
It looks like all the left-leaning porn posters have moved to BlueSky (to the point the main feed was unusable, last I checked).

Spivak 3y ago

This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are. Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol and there's not much value to add over the base experience. Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-licensing Terraform. And worse is that sometimes creating true value-adds naturally perverts incentives. Like for example a true value-add would be "bubble-as-a-service" because Tumblr has some really nasty subcultures which is why posters don't like when posts "break containment." It would be the easiest money ever to just pay and get a huge blocklist without having to go through the effort of making one yourself but then you kinda need those nasty communities to justify the value.

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
From the CEO’s blog today: > You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I think we're saying the same thing, they're successful in the sense that Tumblr users like them but they're small potatoes. Tumblr users aren't necessarily allergic to monetization but the ones they've found don't pay the bills.
- p1necone 3y ago
  (person who doesn't really know what they're talking about when it comes to services of this scale asking) Why does Tumblr need 1000 servers to run? You can serve a lot of text and relatively well compressed image files with not a lot of hardware.
  - 3y ago

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

> the monetization strategies they’ve tried ... crabs Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health insurance or...?

tg16 3y ago
A virtual pet that lives on your blog and occasionally tries to eat your mouse cursor.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throw932490 3y ago

There is very simple monetization strategy: ads, cut bloat, move content moderation staff to India! Tumblr has an army of content creator that work for free. It is a site that host text and images. How they even spend 30 million per year? Maybe on organizing "stuff convention", SF real estate and so on... Cut the bloat!

mpixel 3y ago
They don't spend 30 million per year, they spend 30 million over what they generate. I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.
- throw932490 3y ago
  > they spend 30 million over what they generate That is my point. I do not understand how they total costs can be over 30M. It is mostly static content that begs for CDN cache. It is also not mission critical.
  - crummy 3y ago
    Probably they do a lot of content moderation, which takes human beings at least at some stage.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

They don't seem to have tried the one thing that might have worked for them, namely, embracing the fact that they're first and foremost a porn site. Instead, they decided to be actively hostile to this reality, with predictable results.

inemesitaffia 3y ago
Different owner
- stevenicr 3y ago
  yes, and even though the newish owner has not banned all things naughty that would get flagged at fbk or similar, they still have banned and removed profiles that had erotic content. It's fine to do what they want, but it's become a slightly naughtier pg-13 - I guess nc-17. So those who want naughtier are going elsewhere, and no one knows for sure what is okay and what could be okay today and get your account removed tomorrow - so why put any content into it?