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Tumblr's Unclear Future Shows That There's No Money in Internet Culture (nymag.com)
Earlier this month as Verizon completed its acquisition, a number of Tumblr employees, as well as those at other Verizon-owned properties, like the Huffington Post, were laid off. This comes at an interesting time for Tumblr, which is increasingly struggling to find a business model. From an article on NYMag: The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd -- that's partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 -- but despite a user base near the size of Instagram's, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect. For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users' timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It's tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard. Since it joined Yahoo, the site has started displaying low-quality "chum"-style ads in between user posts on the Dashboard. Looked at from a bottom-line perspective, Tumblr is an also-ran like its parent company -- a once-hot start-up that has eased into tech-industry irrelevance. [...] It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr's size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business. Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit.
it's a huge depository of porn. Google site:tumblr.com followed by the most insane sexual practice you can think of and you will get hundreds of picture of said insane sexual practice.
We'll sell it at a loss, but make up for it in volume!
Well, at least they've got their users locked in by providing a service they can't get anywhere else: a page on the internet
Internet culture does not exist to make money, and that is why it is so popular. Ads get filtered, products get ignored. It's the community that matters.
Time will tell.
There are unscalable mountains of pornography on Tumblr.
clearly the user wants it there or they wouldn't be following the person who posted it. Also, no one is naive enough to associate the ads in tumblr timelines with the content in the timelines in the same way no one associates ads on twitter or facebook with the racism and abuse that is often posted on those platforms
Let me see if I got this straight.
Her father props up Pol Pot and invents the Taliban, but tweets are beyond the pale?
Think about Twitch or Patreon, if you get followers you can start collecting donations, tumblr could easily skim off of the back of content creators, but no, they are stuck in the bad side of the Twitter business model (which is direct marketing at users) (I might add without the GOOD side of the Twitter business model - deep analytics)
A lot of artists I know are jumping over to twitter, tumblr has a lot going for it but its dying squirtle...
In the meantime I'll continue pumping out weird content that thousands of people seem to enjoy!?
sem duvida presisa ter uma vistoria deses site para a rede não vira dip web uma terra sem lei http://ganha-online.com.br/
...people. Yeah, we all saw that one.
The Internet is, unfortunately, increasingly only good for selling people things, or at least trying to sell them things, and for spying on people's lives (mainly, so they can try to sell them things). Any other use that doesn't create a revenue stream ends up falling by the wayside. It gets more and more pedestrian every year.
That the ultimate innovation if the Internet is not to make money?
People naturally avoid advertising. Fundamentally, that's why advertising exists; people do not want to hear about your product, ever, until the moment they do, and you have to be there for that moment.
The only way to monetize a website without charging its users is to cater to advertisers. This makes your service less useful to the people who cause it to be relevant to those advertisers. It is an inherently moribund business model, and has only persisted as long as it has due to bubble economics and the "price" being right.
In the age of network TV and continuing partly into the age of cable, complaining about advertisers manipulating content used to be the sole province of crank gadflies and superfans of cancelled shows. Now it's obvious to everybody, because we are the content and we can watch ourselves get jerked around constantly.
The moment somebody with enough mojo to get noticed offers a version of Twitter where the average user is a paying customer, this shit's going to fall like a house of cards. "But Twitter is stupid," you say. "People will never pay for that when they've been getting it free all this time."
CNN currently devotes itself to 24 hour coverage of Trump's Twitter feed. The public appetite for stupidity is clearly massive. They've been using Twitter for years, even though they hate it now. It only puts them in shouting distance of profoundly irritating people and shoves posts by people they want to talk to under The Algorithm. The moderation is such a perpetual fuckfest that nobody is satisfied by it: not alt-right trolls, not liberal handwringers, not advertisers, not governments, not the company itself, fucking nobody. If users will put up with this for years, even for free, they can't possibly stop.
Tell them that five bucks a month will get them an edit button, a non-algorithmic timeline, and human reviews of moderation appeals and watch. Them. Leave.
There's no money in new media because nobody has the cojones to make a real business out of it.
No money in internet culture? There's not a great deal of culture in it either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit.
Because Twitter has too many employees! They have 3,860 employees. Are they working on a self-driving car or something? What in the fuck are all of those people producing?
Advertisement is pervasive both online and offline. What people want to avoid is advertisement that demands their attention and cannot be ignored, or in some cases actually malicious.
There may be new media, but its still using old fashioned payment methods. I'm not going to buy a subscription to every paywalled news service that happens to offer up an interesting article stub, and so far there hasn't been any universal micropayment system to fill in the void.
Given the critical mass of Google and Facebook single sign on for so many sites now, they would be in the unique position to act as brokers for any such micropayment system. Then we'll see if there is any real money to be made in new media.
Do tell, do tell. Clueless CEO buys clueless company for cluelessly large amount that has no clue of how to recover it? Verrrrrrrrrry Interestink. But Shtupid.
is about as empty and vacuous a term as you could fabricate.
"News services" aren't and can't be new media. They're either an alternate distribution method for old media, or aggregators pretending at being journalists with none of the standards. The former could serve a better purpose than they usually do; your solution could motivate them to re-establish the standards that made them important in the first place. But that's still old media. The existence of an institution defines it.
New media is that which has the means to spread directly from the source, and which allows the possibility of direct interaction with that source. To the extent of your interest and competence, you are empowered to investigate and disseminate things for yourself.
Without something like old media (as it existed before ads were everything) to apply professional rigor to that process, this is toxic in ways we're already quite familiar with. But if old media were functional, new media would serve as an important check on the institutional consensus.
I'm reminded of the youtube political commentators where many of them have urged their audience to support them via Patreon after the advertisement policy was changed. For me, their critical observations serve as an indispensable counter to the agenda-driven reporting, and I've taken to supporting them in this method.
I've noticed that many artists and musicians have turned to Patreon as well, seeming to find good results in the pay-what-you-want method of funding. That's not exactly your typical MBA style business plan, but if it still manages to produce good content or a useful service without necessarily requiring payment from everyone wanting to enjoy it, then I'm all for it.