This move excites me a lot. Tumblr isn't really about "brands" (in spite of what Oath would've wanted you to believe)— it's a lot of things, but at the end of the day, at it's core, it's a blogging platform.
IMO it had a lot of potential in the late 2000s but the execution just wasn't there, and I have a few theories why that could've been:
- Cost of revenue. Tumblr was pretty media-heavy from the start (vs Twitter for example, which started as short snippets of text, reddit which didn't host its own images/video until much later, etc). The cost of this, per user, was probably huge. Moreover, they had to power things like custom themes, custom sub-domains, 7 different kinds of posts, etc. That doesn't sound cheap.
- Location. It matters a lot, and growing a company like this in NYC was probably harder, especially at the time, then it would've been in SF or the bay. Be this in terms of getting the right engineers, investors, managers, etc.
- Ambition. I've heard from a reliable source that David Karp, originally, simply didn't want Tumblr to grow huge and become this behemoth of a tech company. He kept it at about a dozen engineers for as long as he could, and even when the company started growing more, he doesn't seem to be an empire-building entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Now that he's out of Tumblr, he's fallen completely off the radar. I doubt he will build anything else. He's got the money he needs, so it wouldn't surprise me if he just retires.
I think it had, at one point, the potential to compete with the likes of Instagram and VSCO for the younger creative demographic (Can't beat Tumblr's customizability, and some themes make great portfolios). Or with twitter as a place to post random thoughts and follow celebrities (Taylor Swift, afaik, still uses Tumblr. Tumblr invented reblogs before Titter invented retweets afaik). Or with Snapchat and the like for the younger demographic who likes privacy and anonymous features (it had an anonymous question/answer feature before tbh, a company since acquired by Facebook).
But it didn't happen.
At this point, I don't think it makes sense for them to even try to make it happen. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're here to stay as the primary players in their respective markets. The space where I feel there's still room for Tumblr to shine is back in its core competency, which is the fully customizable "personal site".
The fact you can follow Tumblr sites and be followed is icing on top of the cake but not a core competency to be leveraged because the feed market is crowded with all the aforementioned players. The fact you can take any content, and publish it on the web in any format you want (thanks to how highly customizable Tumblr profiles are) is amazing and should be the primary focus.
Essentially, Tumblr cannot compete in feeds, but it can compete in profiles and use its feed as a killer added benefit.
Let's look at what Automattic has achieved with WordPress. It offers you a fully-customizable site, to post your content, and _a third_ of the top 10 million sites (by Alexa ranking) are using it [1]. What I want to see is WordPress building up Tumblr to be like this— an option for people looking to set up websites.
Square just bought Weebly for $365 million, and it accounts, at the moment, for 0.4% of the top 10 million CMSes [1]. The space for small-shop online commerce is evidently valuable.
Lets say WordPress pitches Tumblr as a competitor to Squarespace or Weebly in the e-commerce field. It's already-existing social features could boost the value of its commerce features considerably. Maybe as a competitor to Squarespace or Behance in the personal-portfolio field. Again, its already existing feed could have amazing added value. As a creative I'd consider it over Behance right away for exposure. If you were an artist, would you prefer a SoundCloud that also allows you to set up a personal music site, complete with custom url, online shop, cool looks, etc? Imagine a writing and discovery experience that is as good or better than Medium, but you can customize the front page of publication to not look anything like medium.
Long-term, and if they align the protocols, Tumblr could become a follow button for the web. But first it has to become a larger part of the web and this is where Automattic I think can really excel with Tumblr.
I'm very excited.
[1]: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...