Slashdot Mirror
Entrepreneur On Yahoo/Tumblr: It's the Content Readers, Stupid
An anonymous reader writes "Weighing in on Yahoo's recent acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, social networking entrepreneur Adam Rifkin argues that Tumblr is extremely valuable business property because it has successfully organized itself around the 'Interest Graph' (people interested in the same hobbies or things), rather than the 'Social Graph' (family, friends, and coworkers/colleagues, as is typical for Facebook). He opines that, for a social networking site, readers are far more important than writers; writers, after all, 'have time but no money. Certain groups are going to be overrepresented: Students, stay-at-home moms, the underemployed, retirees.' While readers are just the opposite: they 'have money but no time.... They want to see a picture of a watch they like, and buy it now.' In other words, it's the readers of the content that businesses are trying to reach. And interest graphs can be specifically targeted by businesses, much more so than social graphs."
Here is a (rough, imperfect, insert-your-own-caveat-here) list of popular websites. Tumblr is #31.
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Poor engineering.
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I don't watch the Superbowl, but no matter how much time I spend say playing or watching Ice hockey it will in no way will diminish the value of targeting all those follow the NFL.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Tumblr is such a fast moving, weird place that finding the right things to market to the right 'readers' is not going to be as easy as all that. And a great many users are actively hostile to corporate manipulation.
http://transformativeworks.org/
I don't think it is right to dissociate the social graph from the interest graph. There are things (people, topics, groups...) linked by relationships. Depending of your goals you can analyze some kind of relationships and later some other kinds for other purposes. The error would be to use only the social or the interest graph. Success will be to build the analysis on the right relationships at the right time.
They will gather information about you on tumblr and sell ads on other sites. So this is the best route for Tumblr to become profitable without losing "street cred" (So lame that that is a business term)
You can have your god back when you are old enough to handle the responsibility.
People who can get other people to listen to them (or to read, whatever) are called multipliers, because if you can convince or persuade one of them, they convince or persuade many for you. That's why "content is king". You don't get to the masses without the few people that the masses look up to. Of course you want to have the writers who write what is worthwhile to read. Pretty much by definition that can't be any service with millions of users.
free pornography
im trying to figure out which color of star i should have to sew onto my sleeve when they come around asking for my papers.
The acquisition is priced at over $1billion. Max annual revenue for Tumblr is $13million projected to be $100million this year(high hopes that are highly unlikely, I predict $20million).
Yahoo! is paying through the nose for a highly unprofitable company with no hope of ever generating a ROI.
This acquisition is massive folly!
Yahoo! will make changes. The only thing they publically said was they won't "fuck it up" - which can mean anything.
It's like the Benny Hill joke: "I charge a fair price."
Buyer: "It's really expensive!"
BH: "It's fair to me!"
readers are far more important than writers
- the "consumption economy" nonsense strikes again.
In this case production is writing and reading is consumption. If the readers are not exchanging anything of their own for the content they consume, then the writers (producers) aren't getting anything from that trade.
Rifkin is wrong about more than that, both, the readers and the writers are products on these sites, their information is collected and exchanged, the customers are the businesses that pay for the information.
Has ANY reader on tumbler actually paid for anything TO tumbler? I doubt it. Just like no writer on FB paid for anything there.
What Rifkin is confused is the reason as to why it is even possible to find investors into such business models in the first place, the reasons are not obvious at the first glance, because you have to step back and take a look at the bigger economy around. The bigger economy is massively lacking savings and investments and the business climate is destroyed. This is NOT an economy of readers, this is not even an economy of writers, this is an economy entirely based on fake money.
The banks, the hedge funds are able to borrow fake money created by the Federal reserve at fake interest rates and they have no incentive to use that money for any productive business that will NOT generate 50 or 100 times the original investment back. So every attempt at a new social site is just a gamble.
This market in social media development is just like the larger bond and stock markets (and other fake loan markets, like the student loan market). This is all about cheap money and lack of real business opportunities, complete lack of real savers of-course, so the only people that are still making money are those, who have access to cheap money provided by the Fed basically (through whatever intermediaries).
This is a fake economy, those readers and writers BOTH have no money but what the fake economy is able to borrow or just steal from the dollar asset holders around the world via inflation (money printing).
This is a fake money, gambler based economy and it is the most unstable type of economy you can imagine and it has 0 chances of growing an actual productive economy until this fake economy implodes.
You can't handle the truth.
is who? Somebody who I've never once heard of, but paid slashdot to run his shitty adverstory? This website is a shallow husk of what it used to be.
The premise of this whole article to justify yahoo buying a Picture only wikipedia(or animated gif porn cloud collections to some) for to sell advertising on...now its become trapped as Microsoft's Gimp (yes another one...Nokia is still wearing the mask for a Billion pay off every so often).
I wrote loads but changes my mond...the reality is there are not two groups. There is no rich reader vs poor writer, there may well be a measurable difference in balance of these activities between both groups ...but precious time in question means they are simply doing each activity less...rather than focusing on a hobby sites over a person interaction sites. because hobbies are something you only do if your rich with no time...and they are not as friendly as the poor people without hobbies.
The bottom line here is there is one Yahoo story...and its the elephant in the room. Lets talk about Bitch Yahoo digging itself out from Microsoft's Heels.
"We" as in "my generation": the engineers who are now 35 to 50. And this is what the place has become: a mostly commercialized place, a shopping mall peddling boredom against boredom. Where does this urge to vomit come from ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The internet has become the new "idiot box" as my grandparents used to call Television. It's not all bad news though for those of us who choose to use it well. Between Google, WolframAlpha and Wikipedia we have, at our finger tips, the greatest accumulation of knowledge humankind has ever known. Using it well can and will make the difference between an idiot and a resourceful, intelligent human being.
is a shallow husk of what it used to be.
Ironically, I remember when AC had the better comments, as they were used to to protect the individual. Now its just spam.
im trying to figure out which color of star i should have to sew onto my sleeve when they come around asking for my papers.
I keep thinking this seems to be another divide between (what used to be) Middle and working class. Whatever you call those two groups nowadays.
"We" as in "my generation": the engineers who are now 35 to 50.
Sorry pal. The TCP/IP protocol stack, sockets API, and LAN technologies were developed in the '70s and early '80s. Tim Berners-Lee (present age 57) and Robert Cailliau (age 67) invented the WWW in the late '80s, partly based on SGML which was invented by IBM in the '60s. Relational databases the theory of optimization and transactions also came out of IBM in the '70s, with client/server computing added by engineers at Sybase Corp. in the '80s. I could go on but I don't have half an hour to burn.
The internet has become the new "idiot box"...Using it well can and will make the difference between an idiot and a resourceful, intelligent human being.
So nothing like an idiot box then.
Every great infrastructure ends up being used massively for stupid reason. 90% of postal mail I receive is spam, but 10% is important. (YMMV). The same goes with internet.
Drop the social network crap and funny cat pictures, and you will find again what you are looking for in the internet: a large base of knowledge and communication between people. My four most visited website are: slashdot, jeuxvideo.com (a french video game website), wikipedia and arxiv. And personnaly, I feel just fine about the internet.
Man: You sit here, dear. ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam... ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife: All right.
Man: Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam...
Waitress:
Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress:
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam... (Crescendo through next few lines...)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like spam!
Vikings: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam.
Wife: I don't like spam!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam beaked beans spam spam spam and spam!
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man: Well could I have her spam instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean spam spam spam spam spam spam... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings: (Singing elaborately...) Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam! Spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam. Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Spam spam spam spam!
.
Why not both? I'm sure a majority of people who post on /. have both time and money.
Ah, okay...that actually makes a lot of sense. Tumblr itself isn't really suited to advertising.
I don't disagree with the parent comment(although only as an *extra* revenue stream) to there overlords Microsoft, but a disagree with yours Why wouldn't an advertisement for cat products not be suitable for displaying on a page of long haired cats. In fact for tumblr itself it does not have to profile you *like* Microsoft and Apple do it can profile the site your watching. Like Amazon so with your shopping basket. I actually think Amazon had a missed opportunity.
FTFY
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The acquisition is priced at over $1billion. Max annual revenue for Tumblr is $13million projected to be $100million this year(high hopes that are highly unlikely, I predict $20million).
Yahoo! is paying through the nose for a highly unprofitable company with no hope of ever generating a ROI.
This acquisition is massive folly!
I am sick of this back of a fag packet figure being banged around. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion(the largest at the time). Its argued today its worth http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/03/google-inc-goog-youtube/ $45.7 Billion Ironically in the context of this article Google outbid Yahoo. In terms of numbers http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/ youtube revenue for the year before the sale to Google was $15,057 (whole making losses of hundreds of thousands each month)
I have no idea whether this is a good deal. But these figures are not of relevance.
Stop cutting a pasting from other sites and think for yourself (registering would be a good start too)
Yeah, sorry, got completely turned off to social media by Facebook until I read this post. Glad someone made a site focused on information and not the monetization of user's information.
I loathe Facebook to my very core.
Tumbler is popular because it has tons of free porn. I suspect that will end not because Yahoo is against porn thats far from the truth they allow porn on Flickr IF you make sure its marked properly. Thats not the case with Tumblr and they dont allow its member to report violations. Dont like the content? leave pretty much
Jack of all trades,master of none
I don't think anyone really "reads" tumblr, they just wack-off to all the porn pics.
when I wrote for a tech site I worked a day job came home and spent most of the evening writing. Therefore I was getting multiple checks and jack shit time. The readers however always seemed to be juvenile asshat trolls who would argue endlessly about the most moot points, assuming they had nothing better to do with their time.
Yes, people go to tumbler. For more than porn? Er... And I think porn ads are already pretty easy to target.
Links plz.
The article makes the assumption that we didn't understand this already. I find it impressive that a website has figured out how to be a porn site that people are comfortable looking at wherever they are in public, at any time.
Everyone talks about tumblr and porn, but I have never seen any there. Give us some links or maybe you are just being a drama queen.
Is this article trying to say that exploiting people who will generate content either for free or for peanuts is the key to success? Arbitrage the work of students, moms, etc who are trying to get a few pennies for their work to get large amounts of advertising/traffic redirecting dollars, and pocket the difference? What I don't get is why people generate content for free at corporate sites. If you're going to do it, make a personal web site.
I say there's probably a Tumblr page for you.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Those words remind me again why I stay away from all these made-up-word-lacking-a-vowel services and host my own stuff on my own server. I'm not a target. Just a hacker willing to share, but on my own terms.
Maybe I should call it Servr to at least give it a semblance of social startup coolness...
--frank[at]unternet.org
http://pussysushi.tumblr.com/
How are they ranked? Windows Live #9??? Ahead of Twitter #13? LinkedIn #12 ahead of Twitter #13? Blogspot #11 ahead of Google India #12???
Consider it a wakeup call that the electronically savvy are not necessarily the most electronically aware, I guess!
That being said, though, I think there are a few insights that can be offered: Windows Live is the default homepage on most new Windows machines, and might never be changed (an alarming number of people will readily type in "google" to Bing rather than set their homepage), and at any rate its rank would appear inflated because Google is fragmented. Twitter is probably behind LinkedIn because Alexa depends on embedded advertising js to count pagefetches, and Twitter is heavily accessed through external clients and has relatively fancy AJAX. Blogspot doesn't have as many different ccTLDs as Google itself, so many of the hits are aggregated (12.1% of all hits for Blogspot.com come from Indonesia, for example.)
Or maybe the Internet really just works that way! Hard to tell, really.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Huh? Did he say they had invented TCP/IP or ethernet? Civil engineers in the 1950s didn't invent CONCRETE either. But they built the interstate highway system.
I read a lot online too and I had never even heard of Tumblr until this Yahoo deal.
At one time, Yahoo was valuable. Now, it's just an utter waste of time. Their search sucks. Their news is pathetic and useless. Yahoo mail has completely gone to shit. It's just one clusterfuck after another with those idiots. Why are we still talking about them? Oh, right. Because Microsoft is desperate to compete with Google. Yeah. Good luck with that.
Wow, this is getting into Al Gore territory. Maybe you can explain exactly what was invented by (present day) 35-to-50 year olds that gives them title to creators of the Internet?
I have used 0 of the top 1, and 4 of the top 20 sites. I've used Yahoo in the past, but probably not in about 15 years.I would call myself a once a month user of Youtube.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"readers are far more important than writers"... Who the fuck does he thinks generates site's content???
Tumblr is one of the very few places on the Internet where bigotry flows like water and the owners do nothing to stop it.
Everything on Tumblr that's not porn is SJWs spreading their filthy messages of hate.
Soft skills - this is the generation that built massive companies based on thin air, that get sold for a billion dollars!
Yahoo paid about the same money for GeoCities. How did that work out?
They didn't invent it. They built it. Think of them as the road construction workers of Internets.
Often the ones that actually invent something aren't the ones that build it or make it popular or whatever, doesn't make them any less or more "creators" than the other people involved in the process. If nobody ever used TCP/IP or whatever invention in everyday use nobody would know who the inventor was.
DON'T FEED THE TROLLS. You'd think people would know that by now...
What Tumblr Would Look Like Within Yahoo’s Content (and Why It’s So Tough to Do It Right) http://blog.primal.com/2013/05/what-tumblr-would-look-like-within-yahoos-content-and-why-its-so-tough-to-do-it-right-2/
That list is total bullshit Yahoo only bought tumblr because they have more active users that themselves and they wanted to get their views up and money back... Tumblr is far more popular than blogspot and ask.com these sites died years ago.
The list is compiled according to page hit stats and reflects the last month of traffic. It's quite accurate except for the relatively small fraction of people with adblock—and do keep in mind that things may be different in different countries. Ask, for example, only gets about a quarter of its traffic from the US; it's also rather popular in Japan, India, and Mexico.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Plus there's an age distribution, and there's been a rather fast tumbling down of other sites.
Tumblr is more popular amongst current high-school kids than facebook is. Facebook is for parents and grandparents. Tumblr is for the current high school kids. Actually, facebook is for the bonus site to make for your parents to see that you're friends with the good kids and the appropriate hoity-toity-clubs like math-club, science-club, model United Nations, scouts of boys and girls, etc. [i do not know where the fight-club members are. no one talks about fight club... ;>) ]
Two sites that were filled with questions have disappeared (or half-disappeared): formspring.com (i'm on there somewhere, hint hint) was supposed to go dark in april but the web pages are still there. Ask.fm and a similar ask-a-question functionality on facebook supplanted formspring. And vyou.com (pronounced view?) really did go completely dark. Some kids also have gone onto myspace, though who the hell knows why...
Formspring was really popular amongst the Brazilians. If you had a page with a popular name, say teresa or allyson (in all their spelling versions), you'd get bombarded with questions in portugese and threats asking you to get off of their formspring page so that they could have it.
(Probably worth noting that Tumblr also has Formspring-style questions these days.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!