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."

Comments

so am i a reader or a writer?

[decora]

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.

Re:So, we built an internet, the great infrastruct

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:So, we built an internet, the great infrastruct

[godrik]

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.

Re:Maybe its about class

[Samantha Wright]

There was a peculiar "creative class" hypothesis kicking around a few years ago that was essentially a catch-all term for educated people. Maybe the term could be repurposed to describe low-income arts students and graduates coping with debt: accustomed to a higher standard of living, yet technically hovering around the poverty line. Surely this aligns well with the presented image of the penniless Tumblr content producer.