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Re: Tumblr

#91
post #14

I 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…

IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued. I've done some whole-web analysis and they (including both the open-source project and the hosted service) account for roughly 18% of the web. The volume of content produced on them (in terms of # of words, not # of messages) is greater than on Twitter. If you look at comparables - with Twitter valued at $30B, Reddit at $3B, and Wordpress valued at $1.16B - it's pretty ha…

> IMHO Wordpress itself is grossly undervalued.

It's kind of hard to put a monetary value on a product that is free

Re: Tumblr

#92

As a long time Tumblr user, it's sad to see it's downfall. I had hope that Automattic would change the content policies that brought the site down, but it seems that won't be the case. But the fun isn't over just yet. I've launched Libr ( https://librapp.com ) to replace Tumblr. It's an installable Progressive Web App, getting around app store rules (recall when the Apple app store banned Tumblr). There's a few hundr…

> turning on the floodgates

You make it sound like it's easy.

Re: Tumblr

#93

As a long time Tumblr user, it's sad to see it's downfall. I had hope that Automattic would change the content policies that brought the site down, but it seems that won't be the case. But the fun isn't over just yet. I've launched Libr ( https://librapp.com ) to replace Tumblr. It's an installable Progressive Web App, getting around app store rules (recall when the Apple app store banned Tumblr). There's a few hundr…

Quick tip, the sign up doesn't trim emails and validates them against some rule that fails on 'blah@blah.com '. I strongly suggest not validating emails except by simply trying to send one, it's the worst case to lose an user that's willing to register due to a corner case your regex missed.

Re: Tumblr

#94
post #14

I 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.

If you use Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey, here's a paste of the quick and dirty script I wrote a long time ago to fix the exact issue you're talking about:

https://pastebin.com/QJZSEy2D

It does indeed make HN much easier to read.

Re: Tumblr

#95
Tumblr was one of the first platforms I felt had actively hostile UI/UX The ephemeral nature of the reblog, the dashboard awfulness, the impossibility of navigating thousands of likes/"comments"/... under a popular post. No way to, e.g. sort followed blogs by latest post time. I felt these things could have been easily fixed but deliberately weren't.

Re: Tumblr

#96
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Matt Mullenweg, that's not true: > One of the things that really surprised me is I thought — as probably many do — that Tumblr had kind of died under its variety of corporate parents. And then actually being able to see some of the numbers, including some the numbers post-when they changed the adult content policy. I was like, “Wow, this has still got a ton going on.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/2…

According to the person with the single largest imaginable reason to sugarcoat it, you mean. The numbers look terrible. https://i.imgur.com/IyvL1bA.jpg

The graph you shared shows daily posts published dropped to ~22 million around the porn ban. SimilarWeb shows tumbler has 380 million visits per month.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com

The steady drop over time is concerning, but these numbers show tumbler has still got a ton going on.

Re: Tumblr

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verizon didn't buy Tumblr. Verizon bought Yahoo/Oath and ended up with Tumblr. It's a very different scenario. It's important to remember that Tumblr never turned a profit; as far as I've been able to determine it never hit the break-even point. And the bottom line is that a giant service that's losing money is worse to own than a tiny service that's losing money. Verizon's attempt to kick out the NSFW parts wasn't s…

> Verizon bought Yahoo/Oath Verizon had ATH - AOL, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, then bought and added yahoO to the group, hence the name. Yes, that is exactly how uninspired these corporate names are.

You're widely overstating the importance of TechCrunch within Oath if you believe that that is the root of the name.

While it's obviously well known within these circles, engadget is approximately equivalently sized (see Alexa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engadget vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch ), and even when the company was described internally by its components they were AOL, Yahoo and sometimes also VDMS (which had been transferred to AOL from Verizon pre-Yahoo acquisition).

The name is dumb, we all agreed. As clearly did Verizon, since the company has been renamed since. But it was dumb in the sense of the CEO had a dumb idea that didn't translate well to other markets and not "The CEO had an even dumber idea and marketed it as being a slightly less dumb idea"

Re: Tumblr

#98
post #81
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> said on here the other day about adopting a "Berkshire model" This is not the Berkshire model at all. Berkshire buys businesses that have high cash flow models where money can compound over and over, usually in well established businesses that have operational issues that can be optimized for cash flow. > Just monetizing the web traffic 2.5 billions monthly hits at a $1 CPM alone would generate $2.5 million a month…

I run a web service that gets around 10m hits a month, and I serve one popup ad (yuk, I know) per day (or until cookies are cleared). Compared to revenue, hosting cost is next to nothing for sites like Tumblr that serve text/image content. A similar video site would need to spend a ton of money on bandwidth, streaming CDNs, encoding servers, etc. If you get 2.5 million hits a month, it is certainly possible to cover…

Could you please email me to discuss a possible revenue addition?

home_project123 at protonmail dot com

It is non-yukky and does not affect your content/users

Re: Tumblr

#99

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.

Twitter, IMO, is wonderful when you stop following journalists, politicians, and A list celebrities. What that leaves is mostly meme makers and minor influencers who generally wrap all the bad stuff inside of funny jokes and hot takes.

You can't escape it, sooner or later someone you follow will start reblogging or talking politics and then you just end up playing the mute game.

Every time something happens political I find myself having to mute all sorts of things, peoples names, places, etc.

I used to only really use RSS but then when Google effectively killed it everyone (who were already twitter addicts) just told us "Just move to Twitter, whats the big deal?", now to get the same content I used to enjoy I have to sit through endless political hot takes and arguing.

Then Tumblr took a turn for the worse and everyone cried the same thing, "Just move to Twitter, whats the big deal?"

Re: Tumblr

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-t... Yeah ok, whatever. I don't doubt that it's still a viable business, I don't care. I feel a deep pain every time I think about it. Something beautiful was destroyed with no remorse. The world is worse off because of it. It feels like tearing down statues of the buddha. The one place on the internet where one could explore explicit sexuality without feelin…

Tumblr lost ~70% of its engagement in the 5 years prior to the adult content ban. The adult content ban was a drop in the bucket, numerically speaking. This graph is an accurate depiction: https://twitter.com/somospostpc/status/1161024458460712962 Also keep in mind a decent chunk of the adult content was literally automated bot spam . Meanwhile, Statista's graph appears to be made of random numbers with no basis in r…

The ban might be a drop in the bucket overall, but the ban and the sometimes hilarious attempts at automated enforcement was a huge hit to reputation. What that means for Tumblr's future is uncertain.
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