In the past year, Tumblr’s traffic has dropped by 40%, from about 640 million visits in July 2018 to about 380 million today. Most of the decline occurred after the service imposed a ban on adult content.
Editor’s note: This article is from “Tencent Technology”, Review: Gold Deer, authorized to reprint.
According to foreign media reports, in the heyday, the light blog site Tumblr has more users than Instagram and Pinterest. Estimating from the value of parent company Facebook, Instagram is now close to $200 billion, while Pinterest’s market capitalization is close to $18 billion.
In 2013, Tumblr was sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Not long ago, the parent company of the world-renowned publishing group WordPress.com bought it at a very low price. The exact price has not yet been determined, but insiders have observed that its value may be comparable to that of ordinary homes in Silicon Valley.
Marath Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo!, described Tumblr as “an incredible special asset” with “105 million different blogs and 300 million unique visits per month.” There are 120,000 registered users every day.” She also publicly declared: “We promise not to mess it up.”
Tumblr is a blog site on the surface, but it quickly became one of the early mainstream social networks, although it was difficult to navigate. Tumblr attracts users who create and share art and casual ideas, and ultimately form a sense of community. For outsiders, Tumblr’s mechanism is opaque: over the years, it has no direct messaging capabilities, and even no traditional commenting features, forcing users to communicate with each other by forwarding their posts.
Because it is difficult or impossible for outsiders to insert into the conversation, and it has allowed users to use pseudonym accounts in the past and now, Alexander Cho, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, said the site is for members of the marginal community. Said to be very safe. Owen participated in the editing of a forthcoming book on the history of Tumblr.
Catherine Holderness, senior community trend analyst at Tumblr, said: “Tumblr can provide the kind of anonymity you want, which allows people to share in a way they might not be able to experience on Facebook. .”
However, Tumblr’s structure, culture, and even some inherent things in the code base, from the beginning, they are for anyThe potential owners are all problems. On the business side, Tumblr’s operational assumption is that it can make money from users as it has been invented since the invention of the banner advertisement, that is, to attract enough audiences, and “monetization” will solve the subsequent problems on its own.
Katrin Tidenberg, a social media researcher at Tallinn University in Estonia, has been studying Tumblr for many years. She said: “Unfortunately, Tumblr is inherently unsuitable for advertising, its impenetrable advertising. Business is a huge challenge. Most importantly, many of its users spread posts about adult content in a variety of ways. Many advertisers, especially in the US, are seen by someone on their own products. I feel very nervous next to my chest.”
In contrast, advertisers are increasingly turning to seemingly safer areas such as Google and Facebook. According to market research firm eMarketer, the two giants together absorbed 57% of digital advertising spending. In addition to having the largest advertising network, their “crown jewellery” is an incredibly complex advertising engine that delivers measurable results for advertisers.
As these giants mature, they can attract the best engineering talent, the largest number of advertisers, the most eyeballs and the most partners. They can ride the “flywheel” made of cash and spin at a faster speed. Throughout 2010, Yahoo’s engineering and executive level talents are losing a lot, unable to attract and retain the kind of talent that can help their revenue-generating engines compete. This kind of engine is a bad advertising network.
After Yahoo joined AOL (merging into a new company, Oath, now known as Verizon Media), more or less the same thing happened, and its parent company basically reduced its full value to zero by the end of 2018. The combined network has a lot of “eyeballs”, but in an environment where advertisers have surpassed the low-cost show ads that their websites run, only these eyeballs are far from enough.
Of course, the same thing happens in the media, such as the “newspaper” you are reading now, and the response is to shift from display advertising to subscription revenue. But in fact, for Tumblr, the cost of charging people to access services has never been a real choice, because it is built on the hopes, dreams and countless blog posts of teenagers around the world. Children don’t usually have a credit card, and even if they do, they grow up in a stable environment of free games, free videos, and free services.
Senior media producer and comic blogger Klaudia Amenábar said: “This site has fundamentally collapsed and it has been crashing.” Amanba claims to be a superuser of Tumblr. At the age of 24, she discovered the service at the age of 16. She has been using it since then and is using her.What I learned there began to build my own career in fashion and social media. She added: “Mobile apps are much better now, but in the past, jokes about mobile apps were on the Tumblr.”
In the past year, Tumblr’s traffic has dropped by 40%, from about 640 million visits in July 2018 to around 380 million today. Most of the decline occurred after the service imposed a ban on adult content.
Before the ban was introduced, Tumblr grew stronger because it was as open as the Internet, and occasionally it became so smoky. The fact that it is full of adult subjects is likely to attract some viewers, but it will also make others feel bored. Tumblr parent company Verizon has launched a largely automated effort to clean up all adult content, while eliminating most of the user curation and user-generated content on the site.
Since then, the Tumblr website has collapsed because of its massive fan fiction writers, outside artists, and communities of moody teenagers flocking to other platforms. Amanba pointed out: “This trend has already spread before, many people stop using Tumblr because it is becoming obsolete, and Twitter becomes more popular, and Instagram becomes bigger.”
Tumblr is still a powerful engine for Internet memes and other short-lived trends, with a potentially retro-style, but certainly not as cool as its heyday. It’s like an old car, and if its owner can stick to it for a long enough time, it could become a classic. That’s why Tumblr and WordPress.com fit together in the same family.
WordPress.com is committed to supporting an event, the blog, which may seem strange in an era where something doesn’t happen if it’s not shared on social media. As we saw in vinyl records, wooden toys and e-mails, blogs (and thus Tumblr) are entirely possible to make a comeback, or at least continue to be a valuable place for more thoughtful thinking. And participation.
Tumblr’s real challenge is not that its current value has shrunk dramatically, but that it has been highly valued. With a very popular product and only one of the most vague ideas for making money, it turns out that this is not a business model that changes the world.