"I suspect that the only reason it exists now is because it provides some rudimentary income" - I deeply doubt that tumblr earns enough revenue to even cover its own costs. Tumblr was never considered a valuable property on the basis of its current financial performance - like every other venture-funded social media company, investors simply assumed that they could focus on building the userbase first, and then figure out how to monetize.
Problem is, they're attempting to monetize without any real understanding of their site culture, and they allowed their site culture to develop in a rather advertiser-unfriendly direction. Millenials and Gen-Z are a difficult audience to market to. They have limited disposable income, and they're much more responsive to advertising that seems more personal and "authentic." (like the Denny's tumblr, or podcast endorsements.) Tumblr/Oath/Verizon wants to use Facebook-like monetization strategies on a social media site that is basically the anti-Facebook. And it's not going to work.
This is the start of a death spiral. The harder they try to monetize, the more users they're going to lose, which is going to make their ad space a less attractive investment, which is going to lower the price they can charge, which is going to force them to monetize more aggressively, which is going to push more users away, etc. etc.
Frankly, I don't see any way for Tumblr to survive in the long run without a change in ownership - I can explain why if you like.
And yeah, honestly, I'm going to miss Tumblr. More than any other site, it's great at showing me content that I never would have gone out of my way to find, and it has a really unique meme culture. Oh well, it was going to die someday.
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Date: 2018-12-05 11:01 pm (UTC)Problem is, they're attempting to monetize without any real understanding of their site culture, and they allowed their site culture to develop in a rather advertiser-unfriendly direction. Millenials and Gen-Z are a difficult audience to market to. They have limited disposable income, and they're much more responsive to advertising that seems more personal and "authentic." (like the Denny's tumblr, or podcast endorsements.) Tumblr/Oath/Verizon wants to use Facebook-like monetization strategies on a social media site that is basically the anti-Facebook. And it's not going to work.
This is the start of a death spiral. The harder they try to monetize, the more users they're going to lose, which is going to make their ad space a less attractive investment, which is going to lower the price they can charge, which is going to force them to monetize more aggressively, which is going to push more users away, etc. etc.
Frankly, I don't see any way for Tumblr to survive in the long run without a change in ownership - I can explain why if you like.
And yeah, honestly, I'm going to miss Tumblr. More than any other site, it's great at showing me content that I never would have gone out of my way to find, and it has a really unique meme culture. Oh well, it was going to die someday.