Is Tumblr in Trouble ?
While cycling to work this morning, I was listening to the DTNS podcast, and Tom Merritt mentioned the numbers reported by Yahoo yesterdayand chief among them the devaluing of Tumblr.
I can't help feeling this is yet another “Emperor's New Clothes” momentor perhaps a moment that might better be described by Randy Quaid's character in Independence Day, where he sees the reports of Aliens invading, and starts shouting “Didn't I tell ya!” repeatedly.
Tumblr has alwayslost money. During the years it was independent, it was bank-rolled by venture capital. Then Yahoo came along, headed by Marissa Mayer, and the keys to a war-chest filled with billionsmost of which was lucked into through investment in Alibaba years ago.
For some reason, VCs have always valued the users of social platforms, seemingly regardless of the likelihood of them ever spending any money on products or services delivered through the platform. Never has a better example existed than Tumblr, where not only do the users object to advertising, even the CEO once went on the record to proclaim that Tumblr would never have any advertising (yepDavid Karp said thatI have a long memory).
So what will come of Tumblr? A lot of that depends on Yahoo. At the moment Yahoo is a vast, disjointed tangle of once popular web properties, mashed together with little or no strategy. They own Flickronce the best photo sharing platform on the webnow almost destroyed by Instagram and Google Photos. They also own Tumblronce the darling of the web publishing communitynow left behind by WordPress, and Medium. Recent changes to Tumblr (the removal of replies on posts) make you wonder if Tumblr is in freefall alreadya very similar fate befell Posterous.
Perhaps most seriously for Tumblr, Yahoo is potentially going to sell huge swathes of it's business in order to focus on something(quite what that something might be remains a mystery). Only their stake in Alibaba is worth anythingthe rest of the company is essentially worthless -which makes you wonder not only about the future of Yahoo itself, but also some of the more famous social internet properties they own (like, you know Tumblr).
Who would buy Tumblr ? Perhaps more importantly,whywould anybody want to buy Tumblr? Surely the social internet is essentially donenow. The gradual disappearance of blogging (and by blogging, I mean those writing online journals) has removed the core use case for the existence of Tumblr.
In some ways, I fear we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the “social internet”Facebook won that battle a long, long time ago -and while it's not entirely surprising that Tumblr is beginning to fall into the sea, it's rather sad.