Maybe it will end up like the geocities. All in all, I stay away from tumblr because the pages always crash and slows to a crawl. I'm not sure if Marissa accounted for the fact that Tumblr's users are far far less likely to look at ads than even FB.
Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet.
They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day.
Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.
I'd argue that Tumblr, by focusing on the social, has opened itself to a wider variety of possible revenue sources. They could succeed at social advertising where Facebook has failed. (Not that Facebook doesn't make money, just that they do it while looking like idiots to users who see mismatched contextual ads.)
I don't think Tumblr will de-throne Facebook, at least in its current incantation. A few reasons:
- They are positioned as a blogging platform
- There are too many other players
- They lack network affects that I see, or feel as a user to compel me to stay.
I use both Tumblr and Posterous and find them to both serve my needs. Tumblr definitely feels more social, especially w/ groups which I don't use nor know anyone who does.
Jumping up, businesses and economies go through phases of consolidation and disruption. The consolidation is needed to force massive changes in the market as Facebook is doing.
It's important to remember this as Facebook has forced (like AOL) a massive consolidation. The reason the web will break up is economics (and entropy), there will be efficiencies that the market can find by doing pieces of what FB does better. So, to those that dislike FB, there's a decline, I just don't think we'll see it for another decade.
>but not only that, Tumblr's social interaction model is not as addictive as it is on Twitter and Gacebook...less interactions means less data.
I think the tags people use on their posts could go a long way to serving relevant ad content in dashboard or outside of it. Also from looking around on some blogs on tumblr,I see that people seem to mostly focus on a core group of topics they're generally interested which I can see going a long way with serving relevant ads.
Engineering wise, since blogs are so customizable that may have some challenges, but I can see an automatic "ad-injector" take the same format as the posts on a persons feed (that can't be edited in the style editor), and insert itself (based on w/e factors such as how many posts, page views, type of content,etc). From talking with a recruiter last summer, that may be something much more fun for devs to tackle than trying to redo their backend.
I think a lot more sites should follow Tumblr's lead here, but I fear Tumblr is going to be shut down within the next few years and it'll be the last platform to adopt this approach (at least for a long time).
I just can't see this ending well. I actually <3 tumblr, but I don't know what their options are:
* They've raised a decent amount of money, which means they can't stay a strictly small 37 signals type company.
* 4,000 for virtual stickets isn't too encouraging.
* The themes are a nice revenue stream, but I don't think it's enough to keep them going.
* They've nixed premium accounts which could have been nice.
* They're 100% opposed to ANY form of advertising, even something that's innovative. I don't think they should be doing adsense, but I think there's actually room here for something innovative. They have an interesting audience and there's a certain sense of style on tumblr blogs. They could do advertising that doesn't suck.
I quit Facebook late last year. I have no patience for the games they are playing.
Sadly, this seems to be the way of Web 2.0 sites: build an audience and ruin it by trying to make money with it. I've seen it with Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. I really like Tumblr but I would bet that the same thing happening with them at some point in the future.
Would it even be feasible to monetize Tumblr by running ads on massive scale? I would assume one reason for its popularity is the lack of ads. This has for example allowed quite relaxed page templates, you can make the site look whatever you want. With mandatory ads things would be more difficult.
I definitely agree that advertising is a poor option for most web startups. Ironically, tumblr is the vibrant, engaged, and creative community where they could apply an awesome form of advertising.
This is the time to start the next Tumblr, as the last Tumblr is now dead.
For the same reason that Flickr was replaced by Instagram (and missed the entire mobile wave), Tumblr will lose traction over the next couple of years and be replaced. They'll stick around, but their traffic will fall by half in 24 to 36 months. Flickr for example has been losing traffic for two straight years.
Nothing less cool than using a Yahoo blogging site if you're a teenager. That isn't going to change soon.
I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc.
Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience.
Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.
If Tumblr was going to take on Facebook, we would have already seen it trend in that direction. I love Tumblr, but I can't see it being as ubiquitous as Facebook.
This is not even close to being the real problem, imho.
According to Google AdPlanner, Tumblr has between 14 million unique visitors per moth and between 5 and 10 million page impressions a day. Seriously, how does that justify this kind of a value for the company?
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