November 15, 2023 • 40 mins
What's the story behind the microblogging site Tumblr? How did it go from the nexus of Internet culture valued at more than a billion dollars to a property that would change hands multiple times in just a few short years? We take a look at the phenomenon known as Tumblr.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So? Back in early two thousand and seven,
(00:24):
a twenty year old guy named David Karp launched a
new microblogging social platform and called it Tumbler Tumblr. Carp
had dropped out of high school years earlier. He had
switched to homeschooling, and then right after his studies, he
ended up moving to Japan. He worked for a website
(00:45):
called urban Baby. For a while, he started a consulting company.
He went from high school dropout to web professional to
entrepreneur in just five years. So it's two thousand and seven.
Facebook had debuted three years earlier and had emerged from
the college scene. Twitter was founded the year before Tumblr was,
(01:10):
but it wouldn't really get thrust into the spotlight until
a month after Tumblr launched, because that was when Twitter
had the big showing at south By Southwest in March
of two thousand and seven. That's when the text spear
in general actually took notice of Twitter. So Carp was
fond of these things called tumble logs, and these are
(01:32):
micro blogs. They are short form log entries online. They
took their name from the tagline of a blog called Narcaia,
and Narkaia had the tagline experimental impressionistic sub paragraph tumblin.
So carp tumbled across a tumble log called Projectionist. Now,
(01:56):
this tumble log was, among other things, tracking other tumblelogs
across the web, so it was kind of serving as
a directory of tumblelogs, and Projectionist had a very nice esthetic,
which wasn't always the case with a lot of tumblelogs
out there. The folks behind Projectionist had created like colorful
(02:16):
bubbles that could house a blurb, so instead of just
being text on a screen, it could really be set
apart and pop. They had also created things like frames
that would go around a video player so it would
set again set it apart from the rest of the page,
and make it look really attractive. It was much more
pleasant to look at than a lot of other not
(02:38):
just tumblelogs, but blogs in general, because at this point
the tools to make blogs were a little complicated for
the average user. Like you could learn how to use
the different tools and make a really attractive blog, but
they weren't always user friendly, and Cart thought it would
be really cool if someone were to develop a tumble
(02:59):
log platform that gave users access to those kinds of
tools and made it really easy. So if the platform
would let users choose like a theme or a skin
that would automatically apply and a general esthetic to the
content that was posted to the tumblelog, that could be
really cool. So you can have like different types of
(03:22):
themes or skins, and that would determine how content would
appear when you posted it to the tumblelog. Then the
user would just focus on sharing the stuff they thought
was interesting or funny or thought provoking or whatever, but
they wouldn't have to worry about making it look good
because the platform would do that for you. And the
whole point was just to post very quick things like
(03:43):
not necessarily long thoughts, although you could do that. You
could post a live journal like long entry if you
wanted to, but really it was about, Oh, I saw
this interesting thing. I'm just going to post it here
and share it with people who visit my tumblelog. Not
At the time, Karp was running this consulting business and
he had a developer who worked with him named Marco Armint,
(04:06):
and between a couple of consulting gigs, when they didn't
have anything else going on, they decided they'd take a
crack at building this microblogging platform that Karp had been
thinking about for more than a year at this point.
It took them all of two weeks to build the
first version of Tumblr, and according to Karp, in no
time at all, their brand new platform had thirty thousand
(04:31):
people signing up for it. It was clear that there
was a demand for these kinds of tools and that
a lot of people who enjoyed tumblelogging really lacked the
know how on how to build the kind of tools themselves.
So it became a really attractive place to go and
it became the earliest version of Tumblr. Carp said that
(04:52):
the real appeal of Tumblr was that you could put
anything into it and you could take anything out of it.
So by that at what he meant was that a
user submitting their content to their Tumbler would see that
the platform took care of all the formatting no matter
what kind of content that was. If it was a video,
if it was some text, if it was an image,
(05:14):
Tumblr would handle the formatting, so you didn't have to
worry about it, and Tumblr would make sure that it
looked nice according to whatever esthetic you had picked. As
for taking stuff out of Tumblr, well, Tumblr had an
application programming interface or API, and it meant that you
could actually have it play nice on other sites all right,
(05:35):
Like you could have your own website that you operated,
and you could use a Tumblr API plugin so that
you could pull content from your Tumbler to display on
your owned and operated site. And that way you didn't
have to give your users another link to follow if
you wanted them to be able to see your Tumblr material.
(05:57):
So your one site that could be the focal point
for all the stuff that you were active on online
could include your Tumblr activity. Now, something else that contributed
to the early adoption of Tumblr, particularly among students, was
that Tumblr's ascent coincided with the rise of the smartphone.
(06:20):
The popularity of the iPhone and then later on android
phones meant that there was a new way to interact
with the Internet in general and the Web in particular,
and a new way to generate content for the Internet
and the Web. You know, smartphones had cameras. Now, y'all,
there are entire eras of my life that are largely
(06:42):
unphotographed because carrying a camera around was a choice. You know,
you know, you didn't. You didn't have a camera that
was incorporated into some other device that you happened to
carry with you wherever you went. If you were going
someplace and you had a camera with you, it was
because you decide you needed to have a camera with you.
The rise of smartphones, however, meant that cameras started to
(07:04):
become almost omnipresent no matter where you went, right, especially
as more and more people started to buy smartphones. So
it really changed the way we generate and consume content
on the web. Tumblr became a place that could act
as a display for all the stuff that you created
(07:25):
or the stuff that you liked and you wanted to reblog.
It could be a joke, it could be a video clip,
It could be a digital photo. It could be an
animated GIF or jiff if you insist on pronouncing it
that way. It could be one of any other type
of web friendly types of content and it would fit
on Tumblr. And so Tumblr became kind of a web
(07:48):
culture nexus. You know, there were entire memes that would
gather support and adoption on Tumblr and then spread throughout
the rest of the web. Another important element of Tumblr
was that, unlike other social platforms, users were encouraged to
adopt a pseudonym for their Tumblr account, so the account
(08:10):
could be a really accurate reflection of the personality of
the user. You know, it could be an accurate reflection
of what they liked and what they valued, and you
could get a really good feel for what was important
to the user and still not know who the user
was because their account is all under a pseudonym, And
(08:32):
that meant the user could still maintain some anonymity, which
could be really important. It meant that users actually had
a lot more freedom to express themselves without worrying about
it perhaps impacting them in other aspects of their lives.
Right Like, let's say that you're a kid and you
realize that you're queer, but you also are in a
(08:54):
really sort of conservative region where you can't really have
a safe space to talk about this with anybody else,
and so you feel very ostracized and alone and perhaps intimidated.
Tumblr was a place where you could start to explore
those aspects of your personality and to express yourself, and
(09:16):
the pseudonym could give you some protection from consequences you
might face in your day to day life. So it
really was an important part of a lot of people's
self discovery journey. Tumblr was a big part of that.
So besides just being a place to share in web culture,
Tumblr served a role in creating web culture. There were
(09:39):
entire memes and in jokes that took shape in tumblrs.
The folks on Tumblr developed their own sort of language
in references and punchlines, and they would use that as
shorthand in communication with one another. And then a newcomer
or outsider would look at Tumblr and be totally in
the dark and find it just obtuse and confusing. There
(10:02):
was a little bit of tribalism going on, and there
were of course tribes within tribes, because entire tumbler communities
would begin to form around specific topics, a lot of
them being pop culture topics. You had tumblers that would
focus on fan theories about specific shows, that kind of thing.
You had whole communities that would pop up around fans
(10:22):
of a television show who were really hoping that two
of the characters on the show would end up in
a romantic relationship. Right the so called shipping fandoms, and
the discussions in these tumblers, or at least the blogging
in these tumblers, because you weren't leaving comments, you were
just blogging in it. They ran the full spectrum, from
(10:43):
wish fulfillment fantasies to even scholarly takes on how shows
were playing to or sometimes outright exploiting the fan bases
by teasing a relationship with no intent on actually following
through with it. There are actually some really remarkable video
essays on YouTube that look into this. Arrah z has
done quite a few videos that focused on Tumblr culture
(11:07):
and how various properties exploited that culture. So yeah, really
fascinating stuff. And there were other communities that coalesced around
real world concerns, some of which were seen as taboo
or socially unacceptable in order order to address them in
other types of communities, so users would lean on Tumblr
(11:29):
communities as I mentioned earlier, to explore their own identities.
They could experiment, they could find understanding and acceptance among others.
So on Tumblr you could find a really robust LGBTQ
plus community, for example, and communities within that community. You
could also find communities that supported people who had disabilities
(11:51):
or chronic illnesses. You could find the sort of communities
that just didn't have the same representation on other social
platforms or in real world spaces, particularly for people who
lived in fairly rural or remote areas, So that was
actually a really valuable thing as well. You also got
some extremes in that, and often those would be the
(12:12):
ones held up to ridicule or criticism that people would say, oh,
here's a tumbler that's completely dedicated to people who are
fantasizing about being robots, and then that would turn into
kind of a punchline. So there was a downside of
this as well. But I think the value that Tumblr
presented toward people who really didn't have a support system
(12:35):
in other areas of their lives was something that was
really special. Tumblr would actually see its major boost and
popularity in the early twenty tens, Like it definitely had
early adoption, but that was in the tens of thousands.
It would be around twenty ten where you'd start to
see millions of accounts on Tumblr. And we also saw
(12:57):
a lot of interesting subcultures form around that same time.
For example, do you remember Bronie's That's the term for
adult fans male identifying adult fans, usually of the animated
series My Little Pony. Friendship is Magic. Technically, the brony
culture actually originated on a different website, the message board
(13:19):
four chan, but the subculture also put down roots over
on Tumbler and flourished there. For the record, I don't
see anything wrong with adults enjoying cartoons, even cartoons that
are ostensibly meant for kids. A lot of great cartoon
creators actually intentionally into greate cross generational appeal in their works.
(13:40):
It would be inaccurate for me to call myself a bronie.
I don't have anything against Bronie's. I just never got
into My Little Pony, but goodness knows, I'm a big
fan of other cartoons that are meant for kids, like
Phineas and ferb and Hey Season five is coming soon anyway.
Tumblr's role in Internet culture grew and its user base
also grew, and while the company's valuation continued to increase,
(14:04):
nearing an estimated one billion dollars by twenty ten, Kart
was determined to prevent the sorts of monetization efforts that
he was seeing elsewhere on the web, so he kept
Tumblr free from advertising effectively at least until twenty twelve,
and even then he was very methodical in how ads
could run on the site and the sort of brand
(14:26):
deals that Tumblr would do, and he eschewed the migration
toward influencer culture, which was starting to take off at
that point. That's why Tumblr allowed for pseudonyms, and it
didn't do things like track the number of folks who
were following a specific tumbler. In fact, it didn't even
allow for comments on posts. You could reblog a post,
(14:49):
and you could put in your own take on your reblogging,
but you couldn't just leave comments underneath a post that
was there. He was all about removing the barriers between
creators and the stuff they wanted to post. He wanted
to take as much of that away as possible so
that it could have a more pure path from creator
(15:10):
to audience. But in twenty thirteen, things would change. I'll
explain more after we take this quick break. Okay, before
the break, I mentioned things would change for Tumblr in
(15:30):
twenty thirteen. In that year, Tumblr had seventy three million
accounts and a suitor came calling. A suitor by the
name of Yahoo. At that time, Marissa Meyer was the
CEO of Yahoo's She had been part of Google. She
was actually employee number twenty at Google, and then she
(15:52):
left to become CEO of Yahoo in twenty twelve. And
this was a really big move for Yahoo, this acquisition.
Yahoo had also been in kind of a decline leading
up to Meyer's arrival. There had been sort of a
revolving door of CEOs for a while. You know, leadership
was undergoing a lot of tumultuous change. And then Meyer
(16:14):
was coming in and attempting to create some stability in
the company, and Yahoo made an offer that Tumblr could
not refuse. The offer was valued at around one point
one billion dollars. Meyer promised not to screw Tumblr up.
(16:34):
Now you might wonder why Karp would agree to sell
Tumblr in the first place. After all, he previously had
been giving interviews to the media saying that he didn't
make Tumblr in order to make money. That money was
not the motivating factor for his involvement with Tumblr. He
wanted to build a foundation upon which people could create stuff.
(16:56):
That's what pushed him, he claimed. But following Yahoo's move
their offer to Tumblr, Karp would say that he had
a lot of conversations with Marissa Meyer, and he found
that Tumblr and Yahoo were in alignment on a lot
of topics, including the use of native advertising and branding
on Tumblr. And while he wasn't originally looking to sell
(17:18):
the company, the opportunity meant that Tumblr would have massive
corporate support while entering into the next stage of its growth,
which he said the Tumblr just couldn't do without something
like a Yahoo behind it. So Karp would actually stay
on with Tumblr. He would serve as the CEO for
(17:38):
the Tumblr division within Yahoo. I think it's safe to
say that Marissa Meyer and Yahoo had pounced on Tumblr
without really understanding what they were getting into. For one thing,
Tumblr was popular, you know, there were more than a
million active users in more than seventy million accounts, and sure,
venture capital companies have been making investments into Tumblr to
(18:01):
the point where the valuation was hovering around a billion dollars.
But Tumblr wasn't at all profitable. It really wasn't a
revenue generator. It was running these brand campaigns and stuff,
and had made some strategic partnerships with a few brands,
but the money coming in didn't even come close to
(18:21):
covering the bills. It wasn't covering the operating costs of
the servers, let alone the salaries of the people who
worked there, and so turning Tumblr into a profitable business
was going to be a real challenge. See Tumblr was
also extremely permissive when it came to the types of
content that users could share. A lot of that content
(18:43):
was of a more mature nature. There were entire communities
focused on sexuality, and it wouldn't take a whole lot
of searching to actually find pornographic material shared on the platform.
So let's say that you run a company. It's a
brand company, and you want to advertise to folks, and
(19:04):
social platforms can be a really valuable place where you
can set your advertising. But then let's say you're worried
that your ad might appear next to a pornographic video
or pornographic gif or photo. Plus, the people to whom
you're advertising are all operating under pseudonyms, so you don't
actually know who those people are. One of the more
(19:24):
valuable aspects of most social networks is that the advertiser
can learn an awful lot about the customers that they're
advertising to. Targeted advertising is really big business, but it's
harder to target users when they are quasi anonymous not impossible.
In fact, you could argue that a person's name is
one of the least important parts of who they are,
(19:45):
but it still was an issue. Now, this meant that
when Yahoo tried to monetize Tumbler, they ran into some
resistance among companies that were advertisers. The sexual nature of
much of the content was on Tumblr was kind of
a non starter for a lot of companies. Advertisers were
more interested in other platforms that had a combination of
(20:10):
content moderation and users having to create accounts under their
actual names and share more information about themselves, more direct information,
not just not just indicating who they were through blogging,
but outright telling the platform who they were, where they
were from, how old they were, etc. So the semi
anonymous nature of Tumblr, coupled with the proliferation of sexual
(20:34):
content meant that it was not an attractive place for advertisers.
Then we get to the debacle known as dash Con.
Originally it was called as tumble Con USA, so this
was an in person convention and it had no official
connection to Tumblr. It was catering to Tumblr communities, but
(20:56):
in itself was not part of Tumblr. Organizers were all
part of various tumbler communities, and they had this ambitious
idea to create a live event where Tumblr community members
would gather in person and celebrate the stuff that they loved.
There would also be live performances, there'd be bands, there'd
(21:16):
be a live podcast from Welcome to night Vale, a
fantastic podcast. If you've never listened to it, you should
check it out. I really enjoy that one. There would
be panel discussions, there'd be meet and greets, and there
would be the ballpit. So the story of dash Con
is a complicated one. It involved a lot of bad decisions,
(21:40):
mostly guided through a lack of experience and knowledge, as
well as a lack of capability, which again not a
slight on the people who wanted to throw this event.
I think originally the organizers really did want to throw
a great event. One of them, at least, I think,
was sincere in that desire. The entire time, they weren't
up to the task, and that's again not a slide
(22:02):
on them. They were tackling something they had never done before.
And it turns out that throwing live events is hard, right.
You usually have entire departments of people who are dedicated
to specific tasks within throwing a live event to get
it to get off the ground, and even then you're
going to run into issues, particularly the first couple of
years you try and have an event, so it's always difficult,
(22:26):
and it was, you know, a long shot at best
for this thing to go off. Well, the whole event
became legendary for how poorly it was launched and run.
How some of the organizers ended up begging attendees to
contribute cash right there at the event in an emergency
effort to keep the event going after it had already started.
(22:48):
You know, it's kind of like saying, oh, no, we
need to lay down more railroad tracks because the train's
running out of track to run on. Numerous folks who
were meant to appear at the convention canceled because they
sensed that the event organizers were in over their heads
and would be unable to meet their obligations. The whole
thing became a big joke, and the punchline was almost
(23:10):
always that darn ballpit, which, if you've not seen pictures,
was a pretty pathetic little feature. Anyway, dash Con wasn't
officially affiliated with Tumblr, so it wasn't Tumblr's fault that
dash Con was such a total disaster, but Tumblr's reputation
still took a bit of a hit just through association.
By the way, I already mentioned Sarah Z, who has
(23:33):
done numerous video essays on Tumblr culture. She has also
done an incredible video essay, like an exhaustive video essay
about the disaster that was Dashcan. So if you're really
curious about all the dirt and all the tea being spilt,
I recommend going to YouTube and checking out Sarah Zed's
It's like Sarah z Sarah Z's video essay on Dashcan.
(23:58):
Back to Tumblr though, so, the user base of Tumbler
was slowly growing older because that's how time works, and
as they were aging, they were also kind of aging
out of Tumblr for various reasons, and so some of
them were migrating over to other platforms that were introducing
features that they found to be, you know, something that
(24:20):
they wanted to do, something that wanted to use moving on.
That doesn't mean that everyone left Tumblr, but a lot
of people did so folks began to move to other
networks like Facebook or Twitter for different reasons. Tumblr saw
a decline in user activity and Yahoo was forced to
acknowledge that they had massively overpaid for Tumblr. In early
(24:42):
twenty sixteen, Yahoo wrote down the value of Tumblr by
more than two hundred million dollars. The company as a
whole had posted a four point four billion dollar loss
in Q four of twenty fifteen. If that wasn't just Tumblr,
that was all of Yahoo, but Tumblr was part of
the problem. One could make a decent argument that Yahoo's
(25:02):
acquisition of Tumblr was one of the big booboos and
mergers and acquisitions in the tech space. And in twenty seventeen,
Yahoo found itself the subject of an acquisition. So as
a reminder, Yahoo acquired Tumblr in twenty thirteen, and then
in twenty seventeen, Yahoo itself became acquired by Verizon. Because
(25:25):
there's always a bigger fish, so Verizon acquired Yahoo and
its subsidiaries, which included Tumblr, and they bought it all
for the princely sum of four point five billion dollars.
That was the kitten, kaboodle everything of Yahoos. Verizon would
love Yahoo in with another acquisition and had made a
(25:46):
couple of years earlier, which was Aol, and together AOL
and Yahoo became oath within Verizon, which would later get
a rebranding. A few months later, carp announced he was
leaving the company. So he had spent a little more
than a decade as Tumblr's founder and leader, and now
(26:07):
he was walking away. He didn't really give a full
explanation as to why he was leaving, other than he
wanted to pursue other ambitions. But I mean, Tumblr had
already had sort of a fall from grace at this point.
So in twenty eighteen, Verizon made a major change to
(26:27):
Tumblr's policies by cracking down on adult content. This move
had a huge impact on user activity on Tumblr. Some
analysts estimated that there was as much as a thirty
percent drop in user traffic on Tumblr in the wake
of this decision. Now users objected to censorship and restrictions,
(26:52):
and part of the problem was that the filters that
Verizon had put in place to detect and prevent adult
content from posting to Tumblr were very aggressive, and users
argued that often they were flagging some content as inappropriate
when the content should not have been deemed inappropriate. This
(27:14):
move had a disproportionate effect on certain subcommunities, particularly the
LGBTQ plus communities on Tumblr, and again, Tumblr had served
as kind of a safe space for people to sort
of explore their sexuality and to kind of learn who
they really were. But now they were finding that some
of this expression was no longer being tolerated on the platform.
(27:39):
They found themselves unable to express themselves or to engage
in the type of experimentation that had previously been facilitated
by Tumblr. However, while you could easily say well, that's
not good. I mean, you know, this was a healthy place,
or at least it could be a healthy place for
someone to do this sort of exploration and to learn
(28:01):
more about themselves, there was no denying that there was
also some truly horrible stuff on Tumblr. Stuff that was
not just in bad taste. Often it was illegal. You know.
There were cases in which people found instances of child
abuse on Tumblr, like videos and photos and that sort
(28:23):
of thing, And there's no way of getting around that.
That is truly terrible stuff and needed to be removed.
So from a business standpoint, the move to restrict adult
content was totally understandable, right Verizon needed to prove to
advertisers that Tumblr was a safe place and that posting
(28:44):
ads there wasn't going to backfire on these companies they
weren't going to post an ad, and then someone takes
a screenshot of that ad appearing next to an image
with child abuse in it. That would be absolutely horrible
on every level. But that same decision to restrict adult
content meant a ton of folks would just stop using Tumblr,
(29:07):
So that also meant there were fewer people to advertise. Two, Like,
the people who remained were still faithful to Tumblr, but
there weren't as many of them. The thirty percent drop
is a big drop, so this was a kind of
catch twenty two. Right, you're doing something to one tell
advertisers this is a safe space for you, but you're
also telling them, but it means that we're losing thirty
(29:29):
percent of the people you wanted to advertise to in
the first place. To illustrate the decline, CNBC reported that
in twenty fourteen, a single day on Tumblr would say
users publish eighty four million posts at minimum, So on
the slowest day in twenty fourteen, there would still be
at least eighty four million posts pushed out to Tumblr.
(29:51):
In twenty eighteen, the number of posts was down to
thirty million, so less than half of what was being
posted in twenty fourteen, that was not the direction Tumblr
needed to go in in order to become a profitable business. Okay,
we're not done with Tumblr yet. We've still got some
more to talk about, including another shift in ownership. But
(30:16):
first let's take a quick break. So Verizon had purchased
Tumblr in twenty seventeen as part of Yahoo. Right, so
really they bought Yahoo and with it came Tumblr. But
(30:38):
Verizon's ownership of Tumblr did not last very long. In
twenty nineteen, Verizon sold Tumblr off to another company called Automatic.
This was a little ironic because Automatic is the company
that operates word Press, the blogging tool WordPress, and way
(30:58):
back when Karp was first ide eight ing on Tumblr,
when he was first thinking what would Tumblr be, WordPress
was often held up as sort of the contrast to
what he wanted because Carp saw WordPress as complicated. He
thought it wasn't very user friendly. It took a lot
of work to make stuff look good on WordPress. He
(31:21):
also noted that it was geared more toward long form
content generation, so not meant for microblogging. So in a way,
you could say that Karp created Tumblr to be kind
of an opposite to WordPress in some ways. And now
the company that operated WordPress would also own Tumblr, so
(31:43):
a little bit ironic, I guess, in at least the
Atlantis Morisset kind of way. And to twist the knife
a little bit, there's also the price that Automatic allegedly
paid for Tumblr. So the actual amount was never disclosed publicly,
but rumor mill but the sales price for Tumblr at
around three million dollars. So remember Yahoo had purchased Tumbler
(32:09):
way back in twenty thirteen for one point one billion,
and then six years later it sold for just three
million dollars to Automatic. Clearly, Verizon, just like Yahoo, had
trouble finding a way to operate Tumblr that was either
profitable or attractive to users, or preferably both. So would
(32:33):
Automatic succeed where Yahoo and Verizon had stumbled? Well, so far,
the answer to that question has been not so much.
To be fair to Automatic, the company has had to
focus primarily on fixing issues like bugs for the last
couple of years because under Verizon's ownership it wasn't really
(32:55):
looked after very well. Tumblr was kind of an afterthought.
So well, they've had to spend at least a couple
of years trying to get things to run correctly. And
then also to introduce some new features. So their goal
was really to improve the core experience for users and
then try to find ways to make Tumblr more of
a revenue generator. Interestingly, while much of the old guard
(33:19):
of Tumblr has since moved on to other platforms, younger
users have adopted Tumblr in increasing numbers over the years.
In a September twenty twenty two article, CNBC reporter Leah
Collins wrote that sixty percent of Tumblr's users are Generation Z.
These are the same users that companies like Meta and
(33:40):
Twitter are trying to attract and to retain. It's possible
that the things that set Tumblr apart from most other
social platforms are the features that appeal to younger users
in general. For example, on like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter,
Tumblr organizes posts chronologically, not algorithmically, so you actually see
(34:03):
stuff in the reverse order of when it was posted,
as opposed to you see it in the order that
the platform has decided you need to see it. Also, again,
it gets away from that influencer culture. Everything is under pseudonyms,
it's not under personalities as much, and so you're kind
of away from the whole sort of I don't know,
(34:25):
I don't want to call it fake, but at least
at times disingenuous environment of influencer culture. I will never
think of myself as an influencer, which I think is
on the safe side. I don't know that I'm that influential,
but I certainly don't want to be the kind of
person who's, you know, trying to orchestrate a perfect moment
(34:47):
for camera and assume make everyone assume that that's what
my life is all the time and try and sell
stuff based off that. That's just not for me. I
would be terrible at it if I even tried so,
but I have no desire to try, and I think
a lot of people who flocked to Tumblr are kind
of tired of that whole approach to social media in
(35:08):
the first place. But this doesn't change the fact that
Tumblr isn't exactly acting like a gold mine. Earlier this month,
a leaked memo from Automatic showed that the company was
reorganizing and shifting some teams away from Tumblr to work
at other divisions within Automatic. Matt Mullenwegg, who is this
CEO of Automatic, later confirmed this news and said that quote,
(35:32):
we have not gotten the expected results from our effort,
which was to have Tumbler's revenue and usage above its
previous peaks end quote. Mullen Weg said that his teams
had put in more than six hundred person years of
effort into Tumblr since purchasing the company, and I guess
there just has to come a time where you say
(35:53):
the return on investment just isn't there and you have
to scale back or else you're going to just lose
tons of money. Now, to be clear, Tumblr isn't necessarily
on the chopping block. It's not like it's going to
get sold off for parts necessarily. I mean, maybe it will,
but that doesn't appear to be the current plan. Mullen
Wegg says that the plan is for his team to
(36:16):
really focus on improving the core functionality of Tumblr in
twenty twenty four, and that one function that might get
an overhaul or maybe will get phased out completely is
a live streaming video feature that Automatic introduced into Tumblr
last year called Tumblr Live. Apparently, the site has not
(36:38):
seen widespread adoption the app or Tumblr has not seen
a lot of adoption of Tumblr Live, and it just
hasn't taken off the way that Automatic had hoped. Mullen
Wegg indicated that the company would try their darness to
get folks to use live before the end of the year,
that that is part of their contractual obligation. But if
that doesn't happen, then in January they're going to re
(37:00):
assess the feature and make a decision as to whether
or not it even belongs in Tumblr at all. And
it sounds to me like Tumblr Live is on borrowed time.
There are other features that Automatic introduced since their acquisition
in twenty nineteen, and they've also seen some pretty poor
adoption or in some cases outright opposition from users. So
(37:22):
mullen Wegg is indicated the next year, Tumblr is likely
going to scale down a bit, shed some of these
features and maybe roll back other ones, and really focus
just on creating the core elements of what makes Tumblr
work and to make those better. The smaller team will
also reduce the cost of operating Tumblr in the first place,
(37:43):
which is important because mullen Wegg indicated the site has
yet to make more money than it costs to run.
So I think each owner of Tumblr, maybe not to
the extent of Verizon Verizon was buying all of Yahoo,
but Yah and Automatic. I think both of these companies
(38:03):
thought they saw in Tumblr a way to turn things
around and to monetize things in a way that would
make both users and advertisers happy. But no one has
quite landed on the working formula yet. Doesn't mean that
it is impossible or that they won't figure it out.
But that's been mostly Tumblr's history since it's acquisitioned by
(38:26):
Yahoo back in twenty thirteen. An interesting story. Tumblr's an
interesting platform, one that I never really got that much into.
I think I was too old by the time Tumblr
had come out to really vibe with the culture of Tumblr.
I'm an old fogie and younger communities, with their own
(38:50):
languages and their own values and philosophies, are often at
a disconnect with my own, Which is not saying that
those communities are bad or that I'm bad, just that
we don't line up because I'm old. I still don't
really understand what no cap means. Someone tell me before
(39:12):
I go sit in the rocking chair for the rest
of the day. But anyway, that is the rundown on
Tumblr so far. I hope that they do see a renaissance.
I mean, obviously, younger communities find value in Tumblr, and
I think there is value in it being in operation,
(39:32):
there just has to be a way to cover the
costs of that operation or else Ultimately it will go away.
No one's going to run it out of just a
charitable desire to give young people a place where they
can find themselves. That just isn't how the world works unfortunately. Anyway,
that's all for today. I hope you're all well, and
(39:54):
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So? Back in early two thousand and seven,
(00:24):
a twenty year old guy named David Karp launched a
new microblogging social platform and called it Tumbler Tumblr. Carp
had dropped out of high school years earlier. He had
switched to homeschooling, and then right after his studies, he
ended up moving to Japan. He worked for a website
(00:45):
called urban Baby. For a while, he started a consulting company.
He went from high school dropout to web professional to
entrepreneur in just five years. So it's two thousand and seven.
Facebook had debuted three years earlier and had emerged from
the college scene. Twitter was founded the year before Tumblr was,
(01:10):
but it wouldn't really get thrust into the spotlight until
a month after Tumblr launched, because that was when Twitter
had the big showing at south By Southwest in March
of two thousand and seven. That's when the text spear
in general actually took notice of Twitter. So Carp was
fond of these things called tumble logs, and these are
(01:32):
micro blogs. They are short form log entries online. They
took their name from the tagline of a blog called Narcaia,
and Narkaia had the tagline experimental impressionistic sub paragraph tumblin.
So carp tumbled across a tumble log called Projectionist. Now,
(01:56):
this tumble log was, among other things, tracking other tumblelogs
across the web, so it was kind of serving as
a directory of tumblelogs, and Projectionist had a very nice esthetic,
which wasn't always the case with a lot of tumblelogs
out there. The folks behind Projectionist had created like colorful
(02:16):
bubbles that could house a blurb, so instead of just
being text on a screen, it could really be set
apart and pop. They had also created things like frames
that would go around a video player so it would
set again set it apart from the rest of the page,
and make it look really attractive. It was much more
pleasant to look at than a lot of other not
(02:38):
just tumblelogs, but blogs in general, because at this point
the tools to make blogs were a little complicated for
the average user. Like you could learn how to use
the different tools and make a really attractive blog, but
they weren't always user friendly, and Cart thought it would
be really cool if someone were to develop a tumble
(02:59):
log platform that gave users access to those kinds of
tools and made it really easy. So if the platform
would let users choose like a theme or a skin
that would automatically apply and a general esthetic to the
content that was posted to the tumblelog, that could be
really cool. So you can have like different types of
(03:22):
themes or skins, and that would determine how content would
appear when you posted it to the tumblelog. Then the
user would just focus on sharing the stuff they thought
was interesting or funny or thought provoking or whatever, but
they wouldn't have to worry about making it look good
because the platform would do that for you. And the
whole point was just to post very quick things like
(03:43):
not necessarily long thoughts, although you could do that. You
could post a live journal like long entry if you
wanted to, but really it was about, Oh, I saw
this interesting thing. I'm just going to post it here
and share it with people who visit my tumblelog. Not
At the time, Karp was running this consulting business and
he had a developer who worked with him named Marco Armint,
(04:06):
and between a couple of consulting gigs, when they didn't
have anything else going on, they decided they'd take a
crack at building this microblogging platform that Karp had been
thinking about for more than a year at this point.
It took them all of two weeks to build the
first version of Tumblr, and according to Karp, in no
time at all, their brand new platform had thirty thousand
(04:31):
people signing up for it. It was clear that there
was a demand for these kinds of tools and that
a lot of people who enjoyed tumblelogging really lacked the
know how on how to build the kind of tools themselves.
So it became a really attractive place to go and
it became the earliest version of Tumblr. Carp said that
(04:52):
the real appeal of Tumblr was that you could put
anything into it and you could take anything out of it.
So by that at what he meant was that a
user submitting their content to their Tumbler would see that
the platform took care of all the formatting no matter
what kind of content that was. If it was a video,
if it was some text, if it was an image,
(05:14):
Tumblr would handle the formatting, so you didn't have to
worry about it, and Tumblr would make sure that it
looked nice according to whatever esthetic you had picked. As
for taking stuff out of Tumblr, well, Tumblr had an
application programming interface or API, and it meant that you
could actually have it play nice on other sites all right,
(05:35):
Like you could have your own website that you operated,
and you could use a Tumblr API plugin so that
you could pull content from your Tumbler to display on
your owned and operated site. And that way you didn't
have to give your users another link to follow if
you wanted them to be able to see your Tumblr material.
(05:57):
So your one site that could be the focal point
for all the stuff that you were active on online
could include your Tumblr activity. Now, something else that contributed
to the early adoption of Tumblr, particularly among students, was
that Tumblr's ascent coincided with the rise of the smartphone.
(06:20):
The popularity of the iPhone and then later on android
phones meant that there was a new way to interact
with the Internet in general and the Web in particular,
and a new way to generate content for the Internet
and the Web. You know, smartphones had cameras. Now, y'all,
there are entire eras of my life that are largely
(06:42):
unphotographed because carrying a camera around was a choice. You know,
you know, you didn't. You didn't have a camera that
was incorporated into some other device that you happened to
carry with you wherever you went. If you were going
someplace and you had a camera with you, it was
because you decide you needed to have a camera with you.
The rise of smartphones, however, meant that cameras started to
(07:04):
become almost omnipresent no matter where you went, right, especially
as more and more people started to buy smartphones. So
it really changed the way we generate and consume content
on the web. Tumblr became a place that could act
as a display for all the stuff that you created
(07:25):
or the stuff that you liked and you wanted to reblog.
It could be a joke, it could be a video clip,
It could be a digital photo. It could be an
animated GIF or jiff if you insist on pronouncing it
that way. It could be one of any other type
of web friendly types of content and it would fit
on Tumblr. And so Tumblr became kind of a web
(07:48):
culture nexus. You know, there were entire memes that would
gather support and adoption on Tumblr and then spread throughout
the rest of the web. Another important element of Tumblr
was that, unlike other social platforms, users were encouraged to
adopt a pseudonym for their Tumblr account, so the account
(08:10):
could be a really accurate reflection of the personality of
the user. You know, it could be an accurate reflection
of what they liked and what they valued, and you
could get a really good feel for what was important
to the user and still not know who the user
was because their account is all under a pseudonym, And
(08:32):
that meant the user could still maintain some anonymity, which
could be really important. It meant that users actually had
a lot more freedom to express themselves without worrying about
it perhaps impacting them in other aspects of their lives.
Right Like, let's say that you're a kid and you
realize that you're queer, but you also are in a
(08:54):
really sort of conservative region where you can't really have
a safe space to talk about this with anybody else,
and so you feel very ostracized and alone and perhaps intimidated.
Tumblr was a place where you could start to explore
those aspects of your personality and to express yourself, and
(09:16):
the pseudonym could give you some protection from consequences you
might face in your day to day life. So it
really was an important part of a lot of people's
self discovery journey. Tumblr was a big part of that.
So besides just being a place to share in web culture,
Tumblr served a role in creating web culture. There were
(09:39):
entire memes and in jokes that took shape in tumblrs.
The folks on Tumblr developed their own sort of language
in references and punchlines, and they would use that as
shorthand in communication with one another. And then a newcomer
or outsider would look at Tumblr and be totally in
the dark and find it just obtuse and confusing. There
(10:02):
was a little bit of tribalism going on, and there
were of course tribes within tribes, because entire tumbler communities
would begin to form around specific topics, a lot of
them being pop culture topics. You had tumblers that would
focus on fan theories about specific shows, that kind of thing.
You had whole communities that would pop up around fans
(10:22):
of a television show who were really hoping that two
of the characters on the show would end up in
a romantic relationship. Right the so called shipping fandoms, and
the discussions in these tumblers, or at least the blogging
in these tumblers, because you weren't leaving comments, you were
just blogging in it. They ran the full spectrum, from
(10:43):
wish fulfillment fantasies to even scholarly takes on how shows
were playing to or sometimes outright exploiting the fan bases
by teasing a relationship with no intent on actually following
through with it. There are actually some really remarkable video
essays on YouTube that look into this. Arrah z has
done quite a few videos that focused on Tumblr culture
(11:07):
and how various properties exploited that culture. So yeah, really
fascinating stuff. And there were other communities that coalesced around
real world concerns, some of which were seen as taboo
or socially unacceptable in order order to address them in
other types of communities, so users would lean on Tumblr
(11:29):
communities as I mentioned earlier, to explore their own identities.
They could experiment, they could find understanding and acceptance among others.
So on Tumblr you could find a really robust LGBTQ
plus community, for example, and communities within that community. You
could also find communities that supported people who had disabilities
(11:51):
or chronic illnesses. You could find the sort of communities
that just didn't have the same representation on other social
platforms or in real world spaces, particularly for people who
lived in fairly rural or remote areas, So that was
actually a really valuable thing as well. You also got
some extremes in that, and often those would be the
(12:12):
ones held up to ridicule or criticism that people would say, oh,
here's a tumbler that's completely dedicated to people who are
fantasizing about being robots, and then that would turn into
kind of a punchline. So there was a downside of
this as well. But I think the value that Tumblr
presented toward people who really didn't have a support system
(12:35):
in other areas of their lives was something that was
really special. Tumblr would actually see its major boost and
popularity in the early twenty tens, Like it definitely had
early adoption, but that was in the tens of thousands.
It would be around twenty ten where you'd start to
see millions of accounts on Tumblr. And we also saw
(12:57):
a lot of interesting subcultures form around that same time.
For example, do you remember Bronie's That's the term for
adult fans male identifying adult fans, usually of the animated
series My Little Pony. Friendship is Magic. Technically, the brony
culture actually originated on a different website, the message board
(13:19):
four chan, but the subculture also put down roots over
on Tumbler and flourished there. For the record, I don't
see anything wrong with adults enjoying cartoons, even cartoons that
are ostensibly meant for kids. A lot of great cartoon
creators actually intentionally into greate cross generational appeal in their works.
(13:40):
It would be inaccurate for me to call myself a bronie.
I don't have anything against Bronie's. I just never got
into My Little Pony, but goodness knows, I'm a big
fan of other cartoons that are meant for kids, like
Phineas and ferb and Hey Season five is coming soon anyway.
Tumblr's role in Internet culture grew and its user base
also grew, and while the company's valuation continued to increase,
(14:04):
nearing an estimated one billion dollars by twenty ten, Kart
was determined to prevent the sorts of monetization efforts that
he was seeing elsewhere on the web, so he kept
Tumblr free from advertising effectively at least until twenty twelve,
and even then he was very methodical in how ads
could run on the site and the sort of brand
(14:26):
deals that Tumblr would do, and he eschewed the migration
toward influencer culture, which was starting to take off at
that point. That's why Tumblr allowed for pseudonyms, and it
didn't do things like track the number of folks who
were following a specific tumbler. In fact, it didn't even
allow for comments on posts. You could reblog a post,
(14:49):
and you could put in your own take on your reblogging,
but you couldn't just leave comments underneath a post that
was there. He was all about removing the barriers between
creators and the stuff they wanted to post. He wanted
to take as much of that away as possible so
that it could have a more pure path from creator
(15:10):
to audience. But in twenty thirteen, things would change. I'll
explain more after we take this quick break. Okay, before
the break, I mentioned things would change for Tumblr in
(15:30):
twenty thirteen. In that year, Tumblr had seventy three million
accounts and a suitor came calling. A suitor by the
name of Yahoo. At that time, Marissa Meyer was the
CEO of Yahoo's She had been part of Google. She
was actually employee number twenty at Google, and then she
(15:52):
left to become CEO of Yahoo in twenty twelve. And
this was a really big move for Yahoo, this acquisition.
Yahoo had also been in kind of a decline leading
up to Meyer's arrival. There had been sort of a
revolving door of CEOs for a while. You know, leadership
was undergoing a lot of tumultuous change. And then Meyer
(16:14):
was coming in and attempting to create some stability in
the company, and Yahoo made an offer that Tumblr could
not refuse. The offer was valued at around one point
one billion dollars. Meyer promised not to screw Tumblr up.
(16:34):
Now you might wonder why Karp would agree to sell
Tumblr in the first place. After all, he previously had
been giving interviews to the media saying that he didn't
make Tumblr in order to make money. That money was
not the motivating factor for his involvement with Tumblr. He
wanted to build a foundation upon which people could create stuff.
(16:56):
That's what pushed him, he claimed. But following Yahoo's move
their offer to Tumblr, Karp would say that he had
a lot of conversations with Marissa Meyer, and he found
that Tumblr and Yahoo were in alignment on a lot
of topics, including the use of native advertising and branding
on Tumblr. And while he wasn't originally looking to sell
(17:18):
the company, the opportunity meant that Tumblr would have massive
corporate support while entering into the next stage of its growth,
which he said the Tumblr just couldn't do without something
like a Yahoo behind it. So Karp would actually stay
on with Tumblr. He would serve as the CEO for
(17:38):
the Tumblr division within Yahoo. I think it's safe to
say that Marissa Meyer and Yahoo had pounced on Tumblr
without really understanding what they were getting into. For one thing,
Tumblr was popular, you know, there were more than a
million active users in more than seventy million accounts, and sure,
venture capital companies have been making investments into Tumblr to
(18:01):
the point where the valuation was hovering around a billion dollars.
But Tumblr wasn't at all profitable. It really wasn't a
revenue generator. It was running these brand campaigns and stuff,
and had made some strategic partnerships with a few brands,
but the money coming in didn't even come close to
(18:21):
covering the bills. It wasn't covering the operating costs of
the servers, let alone the salaries of the people who
worked there, and so turning Tumblr into a profitable business
was going to be a real challenge. See Tumblr was
also extremely permissive when it came to the types of
content that users could share. A lot of that content
(18:43):
was of a more mature nature. There were entire communities
focused on sexuality, and it wouldn't take a whole lot
of searching to actually find pornographic material shared on the platform.
So let's say that you run a company. It's a
brand company, and you want to advertise to folks, and
(19:04):
social platforms can be a really valuable place where you
can set your advertising. But then let's say you're worried
that your ad might appear next to a pornographic video
or pornographic gif or photo. Plus, the people to whom
you're advertising are all operating under pseudonyms, so you don't
actually know who those people are. One of the more
(19:24):
valuable aspects of most social networks is that the advertiser
can learn an awful lot about the customers that they're
advertising to. Targeted advertising is really big business, but it's
harder to target users when they are quasi anonymous not impossible.
In fact, you could argue that a person's name is
one of the least important parts of who they are,
(19:45):
but it still was an issue. Now, this meant that
when Yahoo tried to monetize Tumbler, they ran into some
resistance among companies that were advertisers. The sexual nature of
much of the content was on Tumblr was kind of
a non starter for a lot of companies. Advertisers were
more interested in other platforms that had a combination of
(20:10):
content moderation and users having to create accounts under their
actual names and share more information about themselves, more direct information,
not just not just indicating who they were through blogging,
but outright telling the platform who they were, where they
were from, how old they were, etc. So the semi
anonymous nature of Tumblr, coupled with the proliferation of sexual
(20:34):
content meant that it was not an attractive place for advertisers.
Then we get to the debacle known as dash Con.
Originally it was called as tumble Con USA, so this
was an in person convention and it had no official
connection to Tumblr. It was catering to Tumblr communities, but
(20:56):
in itself was not part of Tumblr. Organizers were all
part of various tumbler communities, and they had this ambitious
idea to create a live event where Tumblr community members
would gather in person and celebrate the stuff that they loved.
There would also be live performances, there'd be bands, there'd
(21:16):
be a live podcast from Welcome to night Vale, a
fantastic podcast. If you've never listened to it, you should
check it out. I really enjoy that one. There would
be panel discussions, there'd be meet and greets, and there
would be the ballpit. So the story of dash Con
is a complicated one. It involved a lot of bad decisions,
(21:40):
mostly guided through a lack of experience and knowledge, as
well as a lack of capability, which again not a
slight on the people who wanted to throw this event.
I think originally the organizers really did want to throw
a great event. One of them, at least, I think,
was sincere in that desire. The entire time, they weren't
up to the task, and that's again not a slide
(22:02):
on them. They were tackling something they had never done before.
And it turns out that throwing live events is hard, right.
You usually have entire departments of people who are dedicated
to specific tasks within throwing a live event to get
it to get off the ground, and even then you're
going to run into issues, particularly the first couple of
years you try and have an event, so it's always difficult,
(22:26):
and it was, you know, a long shot at best
for this thing to go off. Well, the whole event
became legendary for how poorly it was launched and run.
How some of the organizers ended up begging attendees to
contribute cash right there at the event in an emergency
effort to keep the event going after it had already started.
(22:48):
You know, it's kind of like saying, oh, no, we
need to lay down more railroad tracks because the train's
running out of track to run on. Numerous folks who
were meant to appear at the convention canceled because they
sensed that the event organizers were in over their heads
and would be unable to meet their obligations. The whole
thing became a big joke, and the punchline was almost
(23:10):
always that darn ballpit, which, if you've not seen pictures,
was a pretty pathetic little feature. Anyway, dash Con wasn't
officially affiliated with Tumblr, so it wasn't Tumblr's fault that
dash Con was such a total disaster, but Tumblr's reputation
still took a bit of a hit just through association.
By the way, I already mentioned Sarah Z, who has
(23:33):
done numerous video essays on Tumblr culture. She has also
done an incredible video essay, like an exhaustive video essay
about the disaster that was Dashcan. So if you're really
curious about all the dirt and all the tea being spilt,
I recommend going to YouTube and checking out Sarah Zed's
It's like Sarah z Sarah Z's video essay on Dashcan.
(23:58):
Back to Tumblr though, so, the user base of Tumbler
was slowly growing older because that's how time works, and
as they were aging, they were also kind of aging
out of Tumblr for various reasons, and so some of
them were migrating over to other platforms that were introducing
features that they found to be, you know, something that
(24:20):
they wanted to do, something that wanted to use moving on.
That doesn't mean that everyone left Tumblr, but a lot
of people did so folks began to move to other
networks like Facebook or Twitter for different reasons. Tumblr saw
a decline in user activity and Yahoo was forced to
acknowledge that they had massively overpaid for Tumblr. In early
(24:42):
twenty sixteen, Yahoo wrote down the value of Tumblr by
more than two hundred million dollars. The company as a
whole had posted a four point four billion dollar loss
in Q four of twenty fifteen. If that wasn't just Tumblr,
that was all of Yahoo, but Tumblr was part of
the problem. One could make a decent argument that Yahoo's
(25:02):
acquisition of Tumblr was one of the big booboos and
mergers and acquisitions in the tech space. And in twenty seventeen,
Yahoo found itself the subject of an acquisition. So as
a reminder, Yahoo acquired Tumblr in twenty thirteen, and then
in twenty seventeen, Yahoo itself became acquired by Verizon. Because
(25:25):
there's always a bigger fish, so Verizon acquired Yahoo and
its subsidiaries, which included Tumblr, and they bought it all
for the princely sum of four point five billion dollars.
That was the kitten, kaboodle everything of Yahoos. Verizon would
love Yahoo in with another acquisition and had made a
(25:46):
couple of years earlier, which was Aol, and together AOL
and Yahoo became oath within Verizon, which would later get
a rebranding. A few months later, carp announced he was
leaving the company. So he had spent a little more
than a decade as Tumblr's founder and leader, and now
(26:07):
he was walking away. He didn't really give a full
explanation as to why he was leaving, other than he
wanted to pursue other ambitions. But I mean, Tumblr had
already had sort of a fall from grace at this point.
So in twenty eighteen, Verizon made a major change to
(26:27):
Tumblr's policies by cracking down on adult content. This move
had a huge impact on user activity on Tumblr. Some
analysts estimated that there was as much as a thirty
percent drop in user traffic on Tumblr in the wake
of this decision. Now users objected to censorship and restrictions,
(26:52):
and part of the problem was that the filters that
Verizon had put in place to detect and prevent adult
content from posting to Tumblr were very aggressive, and users
argued that often they were flagging some content as inappropriate
when the content should not have been deemed inappropriate. This
(27:14):
move had a disproportionate effect on certain subcommunities, particularly the
LGBTQ plus communities on Tumblr, and again, Tumblr had served
as kind of a safe space for people to sort
of explore their sexuality and to kind of learn who
they really were. But now they were finding that some
of this expression was no longer being tolerated on the platform.
(27:39):
They found themselves unable to express themselves or to engage
in the type of experimentation that had previously been facilitated
by Tumblr. However, while you could easily say well, that's
not good. I mean, you know, this was a healthy place,
or at least it could be a healthy place for
someone to do this sort of exploration and to learn
(28:01):
more about themselves, there was no denying that there was
also some truly horrible stuff on Tumblr. Stuff that was
not just in bad taste. Often it was illegal. You know.
There were cases in which people found instances of child
abuse on Tumblr, like videos and photos and that sort
(28:23):
of thing, And there's no way of getting around that.
That is truly terrible stuff and needed to be removed.
So from a business standpoint, the move to restrict adult
content was totally understandable, right Verizon needed to prove to
advertisers that Tumblr was a safe place and that posting
(28:44):
ads there wasn't going to backfire on these companies they
weren't going to post an ad, and then someone takes
a screenshot of that ad appearing next to an image
with child abuse in it. That would be absolutely horrible
on every level. But that same decision to restrict adult
content meant a ton of folks would just stop using Tumblr,
(29:07):
So that also meant there were fewer people to advertise. Two, Like,
the people who remained were still faithful to Tumblr, but
there weren't as many of them. The thirty percent drop
is a big drop, so this was a kind of
catch twenty two. Right, you're doing something to one tell
advertisers this is a safe space for you, but you're
also telling them, but it means that we're losing thirty
(29:29):
percent of the people you wanted to advertise to in
the first place. To illustrate the decline, CNBC reported that
in twenty fourteen, a single day on Tumblr would say
users publish eighty four million posts at minimum, So on
the slowest day in twenty fourteen, there would still be
at least eighty four million posts pushed out to Tumblr.
(29:51):
In twenty eighteen, the number of posts was down to
thirty million, so less than half of what was being
posted in twenty fourteen, that was not the direction Tumblr
needed to go in in order to become a profitable business. Okay,
we're not done with Tumblr yet. We've still got some
more to talk about, including another shift in ownership. But
(30:16):
first let's take a quick break. So Verizon had purchased
Tumblr in twenty seventeen as part of Yahoo. Right, so
really they bought Yahoo and with it came Tumblr. But
(30:38):
Verizon's ownership of Tumblr did not last very long. In
twenty nineteen, Verizon sold Tumblr off to another company called Automatic.
This was a little ironic because Automatic is the company
that operates word Press, the blogging tool WordPress, and way
(30:58):
back when Karp was first ide eight ing on Tumblr,
when he was first thinking what would Tumblr be, WordPress
was often held up as sort of the contrast to
what he wanted because Carp saw WordPress as complicated. He
thought it wasn't very user friendly. It took a lot
of work to make stuff look good on WordPress. He
(31:21):
also noted that it was geared more toward long form
content generation, so not meant for microblogging. So in a way,
you could say that Karp created Tumblr to be kind
of an opposite to WordPress in some ways. And now
the company that operated WordPress would also own Tumblr, so
(31:43):
a little bit ironic, I guess, in at least the
Atlantis Morisset kind of way. And to twist the knife
a little bit, there's also the price that Automatic allegedly
paid for Tumblr. So the actual amount was never disclosed publicly,
but rumor mill but the sales price for Tumblr at
around three million dollars. So remember Yahoo had purchased Tumbler
(32:09):
way back in twenty thirteen for one point one billion,
and then six years later it sold for just three
million dollars to Automatic. Clearly, Verizon, just like Yahoo, had
trouble finding a way to operate Tumblr that was either
profitable or attractive to users, or preferably both. So would
(32:33):
Automatic succeed where Yahoo and Verizon had stumbled? Well, so far,
the answer to that question has been not so much.
To be fair to Automatic, the company has had to
focus primarily on fixing issues like bugs for the last
couple of years because under Verizon's ownership it wasn't really
(32:55):
looked after very well. Tumblr was kind of an afterthought.
So well, they've had to spend at least a couple
of years trying to get things to run correctly. And
then also to introduce some new features. So their goal
was really to improve the core experience for users and
then try to find ways to make Tumblr more of
a revenue generator. Interestingly, while much of the old guard
(33:19):
of Tumblr has since moved on to other platforms, younger
users have adopted Tumblr in increasing numbers over the years.
In a September twenty twenty two article, CNBC reporter Leah
Collins wrote that sixty percent of Tumblr's users are Generation Z.
These are the same users that companies like Meta and
(33:40):
Twitter are trying to attract and to retain. It's possible
that the things that set Tumblr apart from most other
social platforms are the features that appeal to younger users
in general. For example, on like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter,
Tumblr organizes posts chronologically, not algorithmically, so you actually see
(34:03):
stuff in the reverse order of when it was posted,
as opposed to you see it in the order that
the platform has decided you need to see it. Also, again,
it gets away from that influencer culture. Everything is under pseudonyms,
it's not under personalities as much, and so you're kind
of away from the whole sort of I don't know,
(34:25):
I don't want to call it fake, but at least
at times disingenuous environment of influencer culture. I will never
think of myself as an influencer, which I think is
on the safe side. I don't know that I'm that influential,
but I certainly don't want to be the kind of
person who's, you know, trying to orchestrate a perfect moment
(34:47):
for camera and assume make everyone assume that that's what
my life is all the time and try and sell
stuff based off that. That's just not for me. I
would be terrible at it if I even tried so,
but I have no desire to try, and I think
a lot of people who flocked to Tumblr are kind
of tired of that whole approach to social media in
(35:08):
the first place. But this doesn't change the fact that
Tumblr isn't exactly acting like a gold mine. Earlier this month,
a leaked memo from Automatic showed that the company was
reorganizing and shifting some teams away from Tumblr to work
at other divisions within Automatic. Matt Mullenwegg, who is this
CEO of Automatic, later confirmed this news and said that quote,
(35:32):
we have not gotten the expected results from our effort,
which was to have Tumbler's revenue and usage above its
previous peaks end quote. Mullen Weg said that his teams
had put in more than six hundred person years of
effort into Tumblr since purchasing the company, and I guess
there just has to come a time where you say
(35:53):
the return on investment just isn't there and you have
to scale back or else you're going to just lose
tons of money. Now, to be clear, Tumblr isn't necessarily
on the chopping block. It's not like it's going to
get sold off for parts necessarily. I mean, maybe it will,
but that doesn't appear to be the current plan. Mullen
Wegg says that the plan is for his team to
(36:16):
really focus on improving the core functionality of Tumblr in
twenty twenty four, and that one function that might get
an overhaul or maybe will get phased out completely is
a live streaming video feature that Automatic introduced into Tumblr
last year called Tumblr Live. Apparently, the site has not
(36:38):
seen widespread adoption the app or Tumblr has not seen
a lot of adoption of Tumblr Live, and it just
hasn't taken off the way that Automatic had hoped. Mullen
Wegg indicated that the company would try their darness to
get folks to use live before the end of the year,
that that is part of their contractual obligation. But if
that doesn't happen, then in January they're going to re
(37:00):
assess the feature and make a decision as to whether
or not it even belongs in Tumblr at all. And
it sounds to me like Tumblr Live is on borrowed time.
There are other features that Automatic introduced since their acquisition
in twenty nineteen, and they've also seen some pretty poor
adoption or in some cases outright opposition from users. So
(37:22):
mullen Wegg is indicated the next year, Tumblr is likely
going to scale down a bit, shed some of these
features and maybe roll back other ones, and really focus
just on creating the core elements of what makes Tumblr
work and to make those better. The smaller team will
also reduce the cost of operating Tumblr in the first place,
(37:43):
which is important because mullen Wegg indicated the site has
yet to make more money than it costs to run.
So I think each owner of Tumblr, maybe not to
the extent of Verizon Verizon was buying all of Yahoo,
but Yah and Automatic. I think both of these companies
(38:03):
thought they saw in Tumblr a way to turn things
around and to monetize things in a way that would
make both users and advertisers happy. But no one has
quite landed on the working formula yet. Doesn't mean that
it is impossible or that they won't figure it out.
But that's been mostly Tumblr's history since it's acquisitioned by
(38:26):
Yahoo back in twenty thirteen. An interesting story. Tumblr's an
interesting platform, one that I never really got that much into.
I think I was too old by the time Tumblr
had come out to really vibe with the culture of Tumblr.
I'm an old fogie and younger communities, with their own
(38:50):
languages and their own values and philosophies, are often at
a disconnect with my own, Which is not saying that
those communities are bad or that I'm bad, just that
we don't line up because I'm old. I still don't
really understand what no cap means. Someone tell me before
(39:12):
I go sit in the rocking chair for the rest
of the day. But anyway, that is the rundown on
Tumblr so far. I hope that they do see a renaissance.
I mean, obviously, younger communities find value in Tumblr, and
I think there is value in it being in operation,
(39:32):
there just has to be a way to cover the
costs of that operation or else Ultimately it will go away.
No one's going to run it out of just a
charitable desire to give young people a place where they
can find themselves. That just isn't how the world works unfortunately. Anyway,
that's all for today. I hope you're all well, and
(39:54):
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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Karah Preiss
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