Technology

Wow. Did not expect Tumblr to be doing better than Twitter.

They should bring back the porn.

What I want to know about these "unprofitable" tech companies is where all the money is going? Wikipedia, which is run entirely on donations, has an operating budget of ~$150 million. Reddit, Twitter, etc... make many times this amount and even with the greater number of employees and salaries it still sounds like some creative Hollywood accounting that they're unprofitable. It feels like a big chunk of money is just going to investors/C-classes so they can just say they're not actually making any money while the big players get their payday.

If they had just sherlocked xKit and left the site alone — not adding the live video shit, etc — most users wouldn’t care about the ads. I swear it’s like every social network is just copying each other, remember when everyone added stories because of Snapchat, and how everyone is adding TikTok style videos now? Tumblr’s biggest mistake was doing that, it should’ve just stayed as it was. People are on tumblr because they like tumblr. If they wanted TikTok, they’d download TikTok.

Tumblr was THE place to be for artists. Someone should make a federated alternative.

In big tech 30 million is a rounding error

Maybe it's time to socialize social media? All these activitypub-based projects are open source, open governance, and many of them are receiving government grants already, so let's just pay the server costs via taxpayer money and call it a public service.

Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only "losing" it in accounting terms because of paying more than $30M a year for "trademark use rights" to a company based in an offshore tax haven, said company being nothing more than a metal plate on a door next to the plates for 100s of such "companies" and 100% owned by the very same parent company as Tumblr?

Because if there's one thing which is common in Tech companies is using intelectual property legislation and convoluted corporate structures to create accounting losses for the purposed of paying no taxes (and publicly claiming poverty).

Same thing in Hollywood (hence the expression "Hollywood Accounting"), by the way, which is how they just recently claimed they "couldn't pay more because they were losing money" to the actors' union representatives during recent negotiations.

Mind you, such accounting trickeries can be undone by Courts (which can just deem that the "for tax evasion only" daughter company is not actually a real company set up to do business, so all those "intellectual property costs" used to create accounting losses legally become just an internal transfer of money within the same company, hence not a cost, hence do not reduce declared profits and the tax on them.

However there is no actual Political will to do so, which is why even though the laws for it are in the books, they're almost never applied.

So that might explain why the promise to federate with the fediverse (made late last year during the twitter migration) hasn't gone anywhere.

When you ban porn on your massively popular site for porn & drive off a massive segment of your userbase epic style

They put ads into their mobile app, between every 2nd post, that are literally scamming users to look at or click them, and they still come out negative?! Jeez. If ads are really bringing in so little money, maybe its time to drop the whole "free service with ads" business model and go back to subscriptions.

who could have ever predicted such a dramatic downfall oh no

Woah, Tumblr is still around? I'm not surprised they're losing that much money. They're just caught in the middle of the short form journal of tweets/toots/threads and the photo blogging of IG.

I don't get how there's so many different companies failing to make a profit and staying afloat, isn't Uber also running at a loss?

Have they ever tried using their own website? It one of the most confusing experiences