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Wow. Did not expect Tumblr to be doing better than Twitter.
Since 2019 Tumblr has been owned by the opensource blogging platform WordPress, having previously been owned by Verizon (who bought former owner Yahoo). I wonder where they keep getting the money to cover a yearly $30m loss.
I’m guessing from the unlimited money hose that was Silicon Valley venture capital.
Problem is, and the reason we’re hearing about this now, the money is being redirected to AI, and all these negative income companies don’t have enough capital to keep going.
That’s why it seems like the entire Internet is going to shit all at once. The corporate money that tried to monopolize everything we access online has been cut off.
But the good news is that compute, bandwidth , and storage has gotten cheap enough to host powerful FOSS alternatives ourselves.
I’m cautiously hopeful this leads to a golden era of the open Internet.
We had the golden era, and we squandered it by chasing centralized platforms and raising up the shittiest people and corporations.
What we will hopefully see is a resurgent era, but the internet will never be as open as it was ever again. The corporate interests run too deep, the giants have too many levers to control how people experience the internet, and they’re going to abuse that.
And I promise in like 5-8 years, were going to start seeing heavy lobbying against decentralized platforms after some instance gets caught with child porn or something.
or next time Spez hackes lemmy.world, he uploads that as sabotage.
Oh, buddy, they are not that dumb. They are not going to use conservative rhetoric for this.
Prepare to be called an alt-right extremist. Or maybe “alt-left” is going to become a thing to classify you.
But of course you are correct.
I’m cautiously hopeful this leads to a golden era of the open Internet.
Amen, oh brother.
I’m feeling so hysterically easy seeing all this unfolding. The bastards really managed to milk the herd of lamers for so long they thought it was going to last forever. Only now that herd believes in AI, cause it thinks a computer can think for them. There’s a new perspective field for selling snake oil, so they are finally going to stop shitting on ours.
In big tech 30 million is a rounding error
Is Tumblr really big tech though?
In a distant past it was…
What I want to know about these “unprofitable” tech companies is where all the money is going? Wikipedia, which is run entirely on donations, has an operating budget of ~$150 million. Reddit, Twitter, etc… make many times this amount and even with the greater number of employees and salaries it still sounds like some creative Hollywood accounting that they’re unprofitable. It feels like a big chunk of money is just going to investors/C-classes so they can just say they’re not actually making any money while the big players get their payday.
That was my reaction when I heard Spez whine about reddit not being profitable.
How much money did you waste on bullshit? If you’d just focused on running the damn platform I instead of reinventing it into the monstrosity it is now, how much better might you be doing?
That valuable and incredibly useful NFT tech ain’t gonna develop itself! /s
Trend chasing like this always shows me what CEOs are just morons with no vision
It’s a bit like the whole “infrastructure ain’t sexy” argument. As the chief executive administrator, you’re paid to “strategize”, when sometimes, you just need to keep the engines running and the bills paid, but in today’s society that’s not praised. You need to capture people and investors’ ADHD-span, make megalomanous plans that can’t possibly ever come true or be some guy who fires everyone to attempt to grow profit margins.
You need to capture people and investors’ ADHD-span
Are you sure it’s more, not less attractive for people with actual ADHD?
Hedgefund investors need to pay for their caviar and cocaine somehow 😶
Can’t they just depend on bootstraps from bailouts like they used to?
What this number suggests to me is that Tumblr has revenue less than 20 million dollars. I figure:
- about 100 employees
- based in new York
- average $100,000 salary
- 10m annually in humans
- 2-3m annually for office expenses
- 20-30m annually for hosting
Some of these numbers can be up or down, but when I worked at a similar company in New York, we had operating expenses in the same range. (Coincidentally, we had revenue on the same range, and got sold off in a fire sale)
$100k avg salary for a New York tech company? The lowest level employees there almost certainly make well above that. If we’re talking avg salary it’s probably at least $200k.
Really good point, and great reminder that I don’t appreciate Wikipedia enough. They’ve been doing the same thing for 20+ years with no ads and only the occasional ask for money. And I think they know better than to try and make money or go public when all of their content is user-generated.
Wikipedia Foundation actually spends more money giving grants to other projects/orgs than they spend on hosting costs, and that’s still like 20% of their budget!! It’s so crazy
They should bring back the porn.
They sort of kinda did. You can post nudity now. Not porn, but nudity.
And the dirty little secret about Tumblr is, people were still posting porn, this whole time, they just weren’t caught because Tumblr wasn’t actually looking for it that hard.
So in the end all that decision did was hurt them for no reason. Doing nothing would have been better.
They absolutely should but advertisers wouldn’t like that.
The users like it more.
The users don’t pay. Thus the dilemma.
I think we are getting ready to. At least I am paying for Kagi search and Fastmail and it’s very much worth it. :)
The answer: better porn?
Ad-driven internet needs to die.
Ad everything needs to die. It should straight up become illegal to advertise anything other than for people who opt-in. If your product, movie or service is good, it’ll get popular through word of mouth.
Partially true: they want to bring it back but payment processors wouldn’t like that (the post i am linking is from the CEO of Tumblr’s parent company, who bought it from Verizon in 2019)
Maybe it’s time to socialize social media? All these activitypub-based projects are open source, open governance, and many of them are receiving government grants already, so let’s just pay the server costs via taxpayer money and call it a public service.
Putting Tumblr on ActivityPub could be interesting and potentially save it, but there’s so much deleted content from when it was in its prime that I’m not sure if it’s even worth it. The platform is so dead.
That said, giving taxpayer money to private social media businesses is the worst idea ever. In the first place, public money should mean public code.
For sure! My comment was ambiguous; I meant we could consider running government-backed instances of open-source, standards-based social media, not “let’s give tumblr a pile of money”.
A government-sponsored instance could be interesting, but I’m not sure what value it would bring. Also it would probably turn instantly into worse than Facebook with toxicity.
I could see one that focused on CDC / nih data and communications. I use clinicaltrials.gov all the time for work to look at study designs for big clinical trials, could be cool to have an instance that covered info from there. I could see another one maybe for weather and traffic related data from NOAA, state highway authorities, etc. maybe another space related one for NASA and space force (lol). Others for the military branches, it goes on and on. The government has social media accounts for most of these services already, could give the fediverse a big boost if their content is directly hosted on government servers
Probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard, we need less social media, not more.
You can do your part by deleting your account now!
That’s where the addiction part comes in, life’s boring without it but I can recognise it’s been a net negative for the world.
Thanks for being chill in the replies. I read this back just now and it came off a lot more hostile than the jokey/flip tone I had in mind. I don’t want you to delete your account; I like social media and I wanna hear your perspective, I just meant to kid about posting comments creating more social media which is against your stated intent.
DW, I never take anything as hostile really, it felt like a sarcastic joke to me (I’m British) but I wanted to get into a more in-depth discussion which I ended up getting because of your joke. So congratulations.
Read and comment to my other replies if you’d like, I’d just be repeating myself here although there are far more things wrong with social media that I didn’t bring up.
I thought you were being funny :D
I don’t think so, it brought some issues to mainstream attention that otherwise would be left to rot for another decade (or even longer). I’d argue that’s worth a lot and not necessarily offset into the negative by the other things social media has done
What issues could only be address with social media but not normal methods of getting across news?
It’s ruined generations, Gen Z is fucked,only caring about internet clout, whatever the younger generation is called is even more fucked, their entirer lives documented and uploaded to the internet by their shitty parents, including their most embarrassing moments. Boomers are being brain washed too.
Like, fuck. Just think about all the misinformation and conspiracies that have been able to thrive online because of social media. It’s a big part of why society is going down the pooper, imo.
The only positive really is it kills our bordem, but we had to sacrifice our dopamine receptors.
Hey man, I’m no clinical psychologist, but your comment gives off flags that you may be depressed. Please remember that we love you and the world will be just fine since the collapsing climate will kill everyone slowly and everything we do doesn’t matter.
So that might explain why the promise to federate with the fediverse (made late last year during the twitter migration) hasn’t gone anywhere.
Tumblr said they would federate???
Yep, ages ago, and we’ve all been wondering what happened to it. With Threads promising to federate soon, it’s reminded us that we’re not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta, and that we were hopeful not long ago of many not-entirely-evil-companies joining the fediverse. Medium and Mozilla have set some things up, as has flipboard, and tumblr were supposed to be a big addition … that just hasn’t eventuated.
I used to be interested in Tumblr joining the Fediverse, as someone who strongly prefers Tumblr’s long-form microblogging to Twitter’s format. Unfortunately, Tumblr has shown itself to be just like any money-hungry corporation at a smaller scale.
Tumblr is trying to push Tiktok-style short video Tumblr Live, which is filled with trackers, and they have plans to change their UX to be more like Twitter because Twitter is more profitable. Tumblr has the advantage of having a very low percentage of technical users, who accept these changes and don’t find workarounds because they don’t know what’s going on.
With the direction Tumblr is going in, I’d defederate it if it ever starts federating. I want a Fediverse software that mirrors Tumblr’s long-form microblogging, not Tumblr itself and definitely not its horrible community.
Well mastodon is the only platform dedicated to the character limit. Most alternatives have much longer limits (like thousands). Eg calckey and akkoma and mastodon forks.
I think that if a platform wants to support long-form content, it needs to make design choices around long-form. It can’t be a short-form content UX with an arbitrary limit removed so that long posts can be created, if they’re going to be displayed and interacted with in the same way as 280 character tweets.
Some design choices that made Tumblr better for long-form posts and discussion: Being able to tag a post without writing the tag inside the main post body, so posts can be categorized without messing up the content. Text formatting support. Media can be inserted into any part of the text instead of forcing them to appear at the bottom of the post. Q&A. Post archives. Custom blog theming. One account can have multiple blogs to organize content. Replies show the context of what they’re replying to when shared. Support for commenting on posts. They combined these effectively with short-form design like the centralized feed of posts and interaction buttons.
Another reason I prefer Tumblr over Twitter is because Tumblr’s format makes discussion most visible, while Twitter makes soapboxing most visible. Tumblr’s design has flaws, but it’s the best example of platform design that balances long-form, short-form and discussion in my opinion.
That all makes sense.
But I think all of these design choices are somewhat arbitrary. That is, they’re all mostly independent of each other and can be mixed and matched pretty freely without the underlying data structures on the backend changing much or at all.
The point being that I think we’re still transitioning out of the big social era where the platform is a highly walled garden. Once social media becomes decentralised and federated and FOSS, a lot of these boundaries no longer exist or don’t need to exist. Both a tumblr like UI and the ordinary UI and a Twitter like UI could exist on top of a single mastodon server.
Also, interestingly, I think calckey, which has a char limit of 4000 has also made some design choices similar to tumblr’s, but maybe organically and independently so(?)
If its long-form is it still microblogging or just plain blogging?
It supports both, which is why I like Tumblr’s format the most. You can make short status updates like Twitter or long, informative articles on the same blog and it doesn’t look out of place.
Mastodon’s default 500 character limit is arbitrary, and can be changed by the instance admin, but most other AP alternatives (check out calckey) don’t have a limit. It’d be cool if Tumblr does actually federate though.
Thanks for the reply.
we’re not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta
Agreed. I’d like to see Tumblr join the fediverse, though recently it seems to be focusing on Tumblr Live rather than such a big change as federating. Interesting with Medium as well.
Maybe this says something about my awareness of the world: I didn’t know Threads wasn’t the first.
Both the medium and flipboard CEOs are relatively active on mastodon and seem to be all in on the fediverse. The flipboard app can be even be used as a fediverse app. Don’t know how it works for lemmy or kbin … it’s probably mastodon only.
I wonder if that might also be partially because Tumblr has no control over other instances being ok with (appropriately marked) nsfw content. And of course, since about 2019, Tumblr has been very anti-nsfw…
But also yeah, losing $30 million annually isn’t great. Maybe Tumblr should go all-in on federation though? Like, to the point of encouraging users to leave/offload from Tumblr servers and do federation? Wouldn’t be easy, but if they want a longer then solution…
If they had just sherlocked xKit and left the site alone — not adding the live video shit, etc — most users wouldn’t care about the ads. I swear it’s like every social network is just copying each other, remember when everyone added stories because of Snapchat, and how everyone is adding TikTok style videos now? Tumblr’s biggest mistake was doing that, it should’ve just stayed as it was. People are on tumblr because they like tumblr. If they wanted TikTok, they’d download TikTok.
Tumblr was THE place to be for artists. Someone should make a federated alternative.
Like Pixelfed?
Nah Pixelfed is more like instagram than tumblr.
I mean, let’s be honest here.
Tumblr was (like a certain other site I know of har-de-har-harrrr) a bastion of do-what-you-want when it first started. Then it rapidly went downhill, got pornocalypsed, and the smoldering mess that remains is the end result.
Thus is the life cycle of the terrible beast behind social media.
But none of that affects the amount of money they lose.
In fact the CEO of the parent company has been pretty transparent about cost cutting, and I’d bet 30m is probably the lowest yearly losses for Tumblr.
I know people want to make this a moral victory, like the losses are the result of bad community management for Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr but that’s just not true. They were dumpster fires business-wise before they shat on their community, and they were dumpster fires after.
No one has cracked the code on how to make a profitable social media company. The two choices are either community funded (like the Fediverse), or steal all the data like Meta, and arguably the second option isn’t really an option for anyone because Meta would eat your lunch all day everyday.
Actually, not quite. Tumblr has been chugging along pretty steadily. It’s not dead, it’s just not making money. Reddit wasn’t either
Never underestimate the impact of porn on the internet
Almost like human sexuality is repressed everywhere the internet reaches.
Tumblr is still just as fun and funny as before, if not better, without all the underaged people.
But it is extremely slow in comparison.
When you ban porn on your massively popular site for porn & drive off a massive segment of your userbase epic style
That was the old owners. The new owners have stated that they want to bring porn back but it’s not really feasible because payment processors are anti-porn.
God it’s ridiculous how much power we give to banks. If the content is not illegal it should not be up to the payment processors what content a web service can provide.
I think it’s because when it is illegal it’s ultra illegal and ultra terrible. Even then I question how much of it is already pretty sus.
Bit late for that turn eh?
I assume payment processors is also the reason why Verizon banned porn, although i don’t think they talked about it like the wurrent owners do.
Wordpress bought Tumblr in 2019 for, allegedly, 3M$, which is a huge discount, and they’ve done a good job running the place so far.
Woah, Tumblr is still around? I’m not surprised they’re losing that much money. They’re just caught in the middle of the short form journal of tweets/toots/threads and the photo blogging of IG.
Tumblr is still popular with the 2000s LiveJournal crowd, i.e. people who need 500 words not 500 characters or 500x500 pixels.
Mastodon gives you 500 words.
Really? 3,000 characters or more? By default?
It’s still around, and doing quite well at least from a community perspective. It’s an underdog platform and the users want to keep it that way for the most part. The problem, though, is that the staff don’t know how to monetize it properly. The thing they push the most is an ad-free subscriptions service which is already doomed to fail because everyone uses adblockers.
I’m genuinely curious, which monetization strategy would you use? Trophies?
The idea of a monthly service is not a bad one, but they need to offer something other than a thing everyone already uses for free. Tumblr already has other numerous one-time purchases that could be included in a monthly sub, like badges, Blaze, the crabs, etc. Getting one free Blaze per month with your sub, free crabs to give out, higher upload limits, stuff like that. A sub would need to leverage their existing features.
They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr’s own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.
Tumblr’s biggest roadblock to monetization isn’t their site structure or ideas, it’s their community.
They also tried taking advantage of that by enabling pvp through ads. Like making you able to promote other people’s posts or to give them a bazillion checkmarks
Yeah, I dunno what that guy is on about.
The multicolored infinite checkmarks and Blazing came out almost back to back and both were huge hits with the community.
The term “enabling PVP” was suggested by Tumblr users because of the aggressive attitude the community would have towards sponsored posts. As you can expect, nobody wants to spend money to be harassed, and terms like this turn people off spending money on the site.
I don’t understand why Tumblr admins embrace the factors that make spending money on Tumblr bad, instead of culling the free users who attack paying users. It’s not even like the remaining Tumblr users can revolt. They’re hated by the rest of the internet, they don’t have anywhere else to go and they don’t have the tech know-how to set up their own site. Tumblr can’t expect to maintain their “unique website culture” and make money at the same time.
You’re not wrong. The community does certainly need to lighten the hell up and accept the fact that the company needs to make money somehow.
But I also can’t really blame them, either. They see all these other social media sites choking themselves to death in desperate attempts to milk every last drop of money they can, and naturally they want none of that on Tumblr. Finding a balance between making money and not pissing off the community is important.
I don’t blame the community for wanting to avoid enshittification. In an ideal world, everyone should.
But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re not making any concrete protests to Tumblr’s anti-privacy and anti-user changes. They refuse to search for and create Tumblr alternatives. They only cry (on Tumblr) about how Tumblr is the only site left for them, please don’t add this feature my autism and depression can’t handle it blah blah blah. They’re actively sabotaging monetization strategies that are user-friendly. They are - as a low-tech demographic that would rather have a “free” service than a paid user-friendly one - the reason why Tumblr has to enshittify.
Used Tumblr for 11 years because Tumblr has my favorite microblogging format. No longer frequently. The user quality dropped massively after December 2018.
Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only “losing” it in accounting terms because of paying more than $30M a year for “trademark use rights” to a company based in an offshore tax haven, said company being nothing more than a metal plate on a door next to the plates for 100s of such “companies” and 100% owned by the very same parent company as Tumblr?
Because if there’s one thing which is common in Tech companies is using intelectual property legislation and convoluted corporate structures to create accounting losses for the purposed of paying no taxes (and publicly claiming poverty).
Same thing in Hollywood (hence the expression “Hollywood Accounting”), by the way, which is how they just recently claimed they “couldn’t pay more because they were losing money” to the actors’ union representatives during recent negotiations.
Mind you, such accounting trickeries can be undone by Courts (which can just deem that the “for tax evasion only” daughter company is not actually a real company set up to do business, so all those “intellectual property costs” used to create accounting losses legally become just an internal transfer of money within the same company, hence not a cost, hence do not reduce declared profits and the tax on them.
However there is no actual Political will to do so, which is why even though the laws for it are in the books, they’re almost never applied.
Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only “losing” it in accounting terms
this was my instant thought on the headline. what business that is truly losing $30,000,000 every year is going to stay open?
The WNBA. It operates at a loss. Been that way for the last 25 years.
Sports associations are not real businesses. Not a single one of them has to pay their own bills, so all of their accounting is farcical. The NBA, NFL, NHL, and most any other sports organization gets a tremendous amount of subsidy from local governments, a special tax status, and Monopoly protections.
None of these things would be nearly as profitable if they had to buy their own stadiums, pay their own salaries, and pay everyone in the organization properly. National sports leagues are a racket. If the WNBA only loses 30 million a year, that seems like a drop in the bucket compared to what these other ones are costing us with their taxpayer funded multibillion dollar stadiums that some prison company or student loan shark gets to put their name on.
A lot of sports teams claim to be perpetually unprofitable on paper…
But they’ll still sell for billions
The leagues may be unprofitable. I have no idea. But individual sports teams typically make bank.
WNBA is the NBA, it’s the same organization. They make more money than they know what to do with.
The WNBA is not a profitable league and operates at a $10 million dollar loss every year.
Did you skip my comment completely? WNBA is a part of the NBA. They’re not operating at a loss, they are a cost incurred by the NBA in order to promote basketball to a female viewership.
It’s like saying a marketing team operates at a loss because ads cost a company money. It’s just the wrong way to look at it. Usually the people who are adamant on phrasing it such are misogynists, which I really hope you aren’t, and you can understand what I’m saying
The WNBA is not part of the NBA. They have had their own set of owners since 2002. They operate at a loss every year and the NBA covers it as their sister league. Throwing out buzzwords like "misogynist’ is based on feelings. What I am telling you is a fact.
The NBA owns the WNBA de jure: the trademarks, all the intellectual property. The WNBA Enterprises LLC is owned by the NBA.
The NBA doesn’t own the WNBA teams though - although a handful of them belongs to NBA owners. So basically the WNBA teams participate in a league they don’t own.
The W.N.B.A. is currently owned half by the 30 N.B.A. teams, and half by the 12 W.N.B.A. teams.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/sports/basketball/wnba-capital-raise-investors.html
The NBA website literally mentions the WNBA in the “Our Leagues” page:
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a global sports and media organization built around five professional sports leagues: the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League
https://careers.nba.com/our-leagues/
That being said, “misogynist is a buzzword” is a hilarious thing to say. I can tell what type of person you are already, and blocking you will not deprive me of literally anything of value.
Imagine closing that league down when the top 30 or so NBA players combined make around $1,000,000,000 a year.
I don’t see the correlation bro
Have they ever tried using their own website? It one of the most confusing experiences
who could have ever predicted such a dramatic downfall oh no
Internet would be dead if porn was banned in the 90s
They put ads into their mobile app, between every 2nd post, that are literally scamming users to look at or click them, and they still come out negative?! Jeez. If ads are really bringing in so little money, maybe its time to drop the whole “free service with ads” business model and go back to subscriptions.
I would pay $20 per month for a curated list of subscriptions to various news sources. The key word here is curated. If I subscribe to a news site, I don’t want to hear about celebrity gossip. If I subscribe to a new music page, I don’t want to see Beyonce on it. If I sign up for arthouse movie news, I don’t want to hear about Pixar.
We’ve completely removed the idea of curators because “gatekeeping” and now we are stuck with what amounts to a corporate payola funded by the biggest players in the game.
