caterpillarcowboy:

gbattle:

I wrote the below in response to Joe Weisenthal’s assessment of Tumblr’s use of capital. Apparently, my comment got cut off without warning.  Lucky for me, I always copy comments to the clipboard before I post.  And here we go …

A VC (pun intended) who allows an investment the latitude to iterate and Spark (pun) growth with an aggressive curiosity and deferred pressure on generating revenues is a rare special relationship indeed.  This isn’t the standard, it is the rare exception that Tumblr has earned based upon hitting key performance milestones.  That’s not to say I don’t have numerous issues with Tumblr (subpar SEO, lack of dashboard API, no dashboard RSS/OPML export, no opt-out Tumblarity, no public dashboard analytics, poor search capabilities, discovery/search is still rudimentary, etc.), but they’ve established a great contract with their userbase as their philosophy (ex-Tumblarity) has remained consistent:

  • most people still don’t “get” RSS which has never gone mainstream
  • the hardest part of running a blog is assembling an audience - build in that behavior in the most frictionless way
  • virality and subscription should be independent - allow singular posts to distribute and become accretive - the reblog is born
  • socialize people’s aproval - <3’s are born (likes)
  • as a result, 80-90% of their consumption is via the dashboard (consumerized newsreader), their communal center, and each new enhancement represents an investment in deepening this concept as a differentiator.


Though I’m not involved in the Sharks vs. Cats tom-foolery, and didn’t participate in Tumblr’s Valentine’s Day “revenue” play, I’d rather see the site stay disciplined in terms of costs and remain playful than shove contextual ads in the dashboard, banners on the blogs, or have deep sponsorship skinning of areas on the site.  If it’s a choice between fully serving your audience and fostering the rapid growth of differentiated traffic without a revenue model or a perfect revenue model and little to no audience on generic traffic, I’ll take the former all day every day.  You can always figure out a revenue model on consistent growth of “good” traffic later if you’ve earned the privilege with your investors.

Great comment, worthy of a reblog :)

My biggest concern is that the Tumblr demographic in a social network / content consumption environment is impossible to monetize to the tune of $450 million, which is what I would guess Tumblr’s exit needs to be to satisfy their investors. So while I would also love all of the features you list (especially dashboard API and like/reblog API support), I think that’s besides the point. I think Tumblr needs to focus on building out their platform in a way that attracts people with real money - businesses. Either that or branch off into some radical different way, like creating a marketplace or real-time search index.