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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 supp

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.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  A lot of people use it to promote their art or to share screencaps/gifs/clips of movies, so I think people would get pretty cranky if the image files were overly compressed (unless it's the magic kind of compression that doesn't cost any fidelity. I don't really understand how compression works). That's without getting into video content.
- evanelias 3y ago
  It's a social network. Tumblr serves a lot of traffic, and has a lot of data. The product data alone is over 1 trillion rows in relational databases by my estimation (former early eng there), and that's not accounting for replication / high availability. 1000 servers actually sounds surprisingly small. It was a fair bit higher than that a decade ago, and that was on bare metal then, vs (afaik) cloud VMs now. Then again, their traffic is a lot lower now, but still nothing to sneeze at.
- photomatt 3y ago
  For the YC audience: Tumblr has about 60B images using 8 petabytes of storage. 205TB of memory, 46,752 CPU threads, 250 kW of energy. About 100k requests a second, a petabyte a day of bandwidth.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    So in short, the answer to my question is that the scale is way way larger than I imagined.

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.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
A lot of people use it to promote their art or to share screencaps/gifs/clips of movies, so I think people would get pretty cranky if the image files were overly compressed (unless it's the magic kind of compression that doesn't cost any fidelity. I don't really understand how compression works). That's without getting into video content.
evanelias 3y ago
It's a social network. Tumblr serves a lot of traffic, and has a lot of data. The product data alone is over 1 trillion rows in relational databases by my estimation (former early eng there), and that's not accounting for replication / high availability. 1000 servers actually sounds surprisingly small. It was a fair bit higher than that a decade ago, and that was on bare metal then, vs (afaik) cloud VMs now. Then again, their traffic is a lot lower now, but still nothing to sneeze at.
photomatt 3y ago
For the YC audience: Tumblr has about 60B images using 8 petabytes of storage. 205TB of memory, 46,752 CPU threads, 250 kW of energy. About 100k requests a second, a petabyte a day of bandwidth.
- p1necone 3y ago
  So in short, the answer to my question is that the scale is way way larger than I imagined.