Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut. There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.
Hate to say it, but what do you mean by "stuck"? Stuck in what way?
Tumblr
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: Tumblr
#12Now we are stuck with Facebook, a closed platform. Or Reddit, which masquerades as an open platform, but is really closed shut. There's only Twitter now. And Twitter kind of sucks.
Hate to say it, but what do you mean by "stuck"? Stuck in what way?
There are no good, open alternatives that are widely used.
Re: Tumblr
#13Diversity of decision making would still help Tumblr. You know in which ways.
I actually have no idea what you're alluding to here; can you be a bit more explicit for us oblivious readers?
Re: Tumblr
#14I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take the deduction and stop the losses.
Still, considering the fact that Tumblr still does over 2.5 billion page views per month [1], not even counting their mobile usage, I can't help but gawk at what a steal Automattic got. Really drives home what their CEO Matt Mullenweg said on here the other day about adopting a "Berkshire model"—although he was referring to independent management, what he's really talking about is buying companies grossly undervalued for dirt-cheap. Just monetizing the web traffic 2.5 billions monthly hits at a $1 CPM alone would generate $2.5 million a month in revenue, $30 million annually.
What kind of business, let alone web business, sells for 1/10th annual revenue? For reference, Reddit does 6x the page views, but is valued at $3 billion. Reddit's prospects are obviously better, but are they 1000/6 = 166x times better per current page view? Mind-boggling.
Re: Tumblr
#15I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take…
Assuming you want to keep Tumblr running, you are also buying the ~200 employees and the costs of running the site. Assuming the 200 employees cost $100k each (salary + benefits) and you are already at $20M in costs.
Re: Tumblr
#16I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take…
The article with “well below $20 million” was later revised to be “$3 million”; this wasn’t revealed by Fred.
Re: Tumblr
#17Their next place is 404.
Re: Tumblr
#18> But it is also true that Tumblr was bypassed by native mobile applications like Instagram and Snapchat where it was even easier to post about your life. This. It's understated how much Tumblr's clunky composing hurt it as a platform. I know people connected to Tumblr, and from what I hear there was a lot of ideas but little direction. There was a time when Tumblr was bigger than Instagram— Tumblr could've focused m…
I think you are talking about current developments, but it is worth mentioning that when Twitter launched it was just as flip phones started to be replaced by smartphones. Most people were interacting with the service through SMS.
To me, it felt like the progress with further developing tumblr slowed after Marco Arment moved onto other projects.
From a historic perspective, this may an interesting article to some people.
https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product?utm_source=f...
Re: Tumblr
#19I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take…
Off topic here, but reading this text blob, would it hurt HN to increase line-height a smidge? Like to ~1.5x? That would be 13pt and SO much easier to digest.
Re: Tumblr
#20I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take…
Assuming you want to keep Tumblr running, you are also buying the ~200 employees and the costs of running the site. Assuming the 200 employees cost $100k each (salary + benefits) and you are already at $20M in costs.
If I bought Tumblr in a $3 million fire sale, I don't think I'd keep 200 employees on the payroll, but yes, it combined with the tax write-off and infrastructure costs it's reasonable for Yahoo to want to dump it as fast as possible—they could easily be losing $5M a month on it. I'm just shocked there aren't more opportunists in the market that would have bid the price up to at least something resembling reasonable. That being said, even an extremely well-executed turn-around could be 6 months until break-even, which would require potentially upfront $30 million in losses, in which context the sale price is insignificant, and so the question becomes who has web business expertise + $30 million in cash to burn and desire to confidently make a $15-20 million annual profit business a year or two out. Apparently, not many people/companies.