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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#231

Post by jcranmer »

tptacek wrote: post #126
gnicholas wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users) Well, according to this chart (which I have only cursorily vetted), it seems there are a lot of "former users": https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/af9rwu/oc_... It shows that as of Jan, 2019, there were about 50% as many users as when the ban was announced. That would suggest that there are as many "former users" as t…

The assumption that Tumblr's loss of users is entirely or even mostly due to suppressing adult content is probably unwarranted, but I'd be interested in data either way.

On July 15, 2017, ~36 million posts were made on Tumblr [1]. A year later, July 14, 2018 [4], about ~31 million posts were made [2]. July 13, 2019 saw only ~21 million [3].

The Wayback Machine doesn't have fine-grained enough details to get a good estimate of how much the loss of adult content itself was responsible, but this does reinforce the impression given from the Google Trends link cited several times that there has been a steady decline in Tumblr punctuated with a massive hit on or around the removal of adult content.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170711122839/https://www.tumbl...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180714223645/http://tumblr.com...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190713180936/http://tumblr.com...

[4] Each of these dates is a Saturday, so not quite a year later, but matching time of year and day-of-week is better anyways.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#233

Post by umeshunni »

lesinski wrote: post #153

Facebook bought Instagram for $1B. About a year later, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1B.

That's crazy (and true).

Instagram is worth $50B-200B today based on their revenue contributions to Facebook on the conservative and their growth contributions on the generous end.

Tumblr as it turns out, is worth less than $3M https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1161038705295089664

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#234

Post by djsumdog »

curryst wrote: post #162
photomatt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are planning to do the opposite: excited to invest into the platform. The web needs open and independent publishing and social media more than ever.

Does it? There are an awful lot of platforms that support the kind of content Tumblr supports now. How is this meaningfully different from a WordPress account, or a user subreddit, or a Medium blog, or even Facebook? How is Tumblr going to provide a platform that is substantially different from those? There are more open platforms. There are more popular platforms. There are more independent platforms. How is the new…

The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you.

The future is not centralized. The future is distributed.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#235

Post by Consultant32452 »

alexis_fr wrote: post #179
parsimo2010 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's the former users that are complaining rather than the current users. The problem is that the Tumblr with its current set of users and current policies are what make it a boring and uninteresting place to go on the web. Tumblr was a hot property specifically because of the former users, and if the site doesn't try to get them back it will become something reminiscent of Digg and Myspace- something to be loo…

One thing I’ve noticed with the Tumblr migration, is that I’ve switched to hard core porn. With Tumblr I had my lists of soft things where there was a lot left to imagine. Some of them are still online, proof they were supersoft. But I had to surf away and I can’t find mild ones. All because some überentity wants to sanitize and cleanse the world. And drove all the softporn to Instagram, where the everyday girl poses…

This happens with other things as well. One of the problems with kicking $bad_thought people off the mainstream platforms like Twitter is all the $bad_thought people get isolated, enter an echo chamber, and radicalize.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#236

Post by nopriorarrests »

rxhernandez wrote: post #230
nopriorarrests wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. It does not work that way. If some average person sees some brand advertised on WSJ and FT, and another competing brand on PornHub he will attach more 'premium' value to a first brand, and will pay more for owning product from this brand. It's only normal and a part of human nature. People enjoy content from PornHub, but they want to be associated with something a…

> people want to signal status People are biological animals first and humans at a distant second. It's short-sighted to so brazenly dismiss the long term effects of periodically associating a brand with the strong feelings that come with an orgasm.

>From my experience in dealing with very rich and very poor people of many different cultures, the only people who give a damn about status to that extent are the young and dumb

Sorry, you are mostly wrong here.

Let me present you with example of an ad targeted to 50+ very rich audience. This is an ad directed by Cohen brothers ("Big Lebowski", "No Country For Old Men", etc) advertising Mercedes AMG Roadster and shown during SuperBowl -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exxaJrtH2kg -- and pay attention to a punchline -- "still looking good". Pure signaling for an older folks.

This may sound illogical, but most people who buy "signaling" products (such as Mercedes AMG Roadster) are in +40 y.o. cohort. They got money to spend, unlike millenials who can only signal status while choosing craft beer on Friday evening.

Also, your guess about me living in my "pristine little bubble" was too personal, tbh, but I'm fine with that. No offense taken here.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#238

Post by CriticalCathed »

mijustin wrote: post #225
robbiet480 wrote: post #192

Axios now reporting [0] that the purchase price was under $3 million [0]: https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1161038705295089664?s=...

‪$3 million for Tumblr seems like an incredible deal.‬ ‪(As a comparison, Automattic bought a small bootstrapped startup [WooCommerce] in 2015 for $30 million)‬

Didn't Yahoo pay more than a billion for it? Yikes.

At this price it seems that this was more of a liquidation than a sale.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#239

Post by justinator »

photomatt wrote: post #11

I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend. I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.

Sounds cool! Are you hiring?!

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#240

Post by loceng »

knd775 wrote: post #24
romwell wrote: post #20

So, the real question is: are the censorship policies going to be reversed? To be specific, is adult content going to be kosher on Tumblr again? Because if not, I'd have very little faith in the platform (and I do have an account there).

Nope. >Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

Yup - so will die sooner than later once an adequate alternative exists. Shaming sex and sexuality via policy has no place in a reasonable, civilized, accepting - healthy society.
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