Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.
Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing.
So what’s new? Simply, Tumblr gets better faster. The work ahead of us remains the same – and we still have a long way to go! – but with more resources to draw from.
Yahoo is the original Internet company, and Marissa and her team share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. I couldn’t be more excited to have her help. We also share a vision for Tumblr’s business that doesn’t compromise the community and product we love. Plus both our logos end with punctuation!
As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down.
Fuck yeah,
David
“Fuck yeah.” — David Karp
In fact, Karp revealed, if an original piece of content is published to Tumblr, that content is on average reblogged nine times, appears in four Facebook feeds, and five Twitter feeds. So among the 80 million blogs on Tumblr, only between 10 and 15 percent of the content is deemed “original.” The remainder is reblogged — something you can either interpret as the inspiring power of the Tumblr network or the slow death of original Web content.
Tumblr talks marketing, user franchising, and the power of the reblog | Digital Trends (via elasticself)
This is a good piece, and it explains why Tumblr has yet to go down the road of monetization for individual users. Key line: “Because YouTube is sending a check to its users at the end of every month, YouTube’s monetization structure “shapes the behavior of the community” and normalizes content creation. It motivates content creators to churn out work for the sake of generating revenue on YouTube.
cnbc:
Tumblr CEO, David Karp, swings by CNBC!
Photo snapped by our very own MC Wellons.
“… and this is how the site went down yesterday.”
Our engineering processes seriously failed this afternoon and cost you and your blogs nearly 4 hours of downtime and almost 100 million views.
Painfully, this isn’t the first time this winter I’ve had to give you similar news.
When incidents like this happen, our entire engineering team comes online to support the recovery as needed. Immediately after, we begin taking every measure to protect from the uncovered issue in the future.
We are constantly working to shore up our processes and solidify the stability of this quickly growing network, even more so as we’ve fallen behind the last few weeks.
Tumblr’s success is supporting your success, and we take this mission very seriously.
This was a rough one. As Hacker News points out, they had to shut off the DNS to fix it.
Fashion is one of the platform’s most-popular industries, and they just got another major brand on the service today: Calvin Klein. Karp gave the keynote at the Decoded Fashion one-day conference. Next question: When will end-users get access to such analytics?
![marc:
radiofreeandrew:
prostheticknowledge:
David Karp, founder of Tumblr, on the cover of WIRED UK Magazine
[Via WIRED UK Facebook page]
So which member of Oasis do you think David most closely resembles?
:-)
It’s official, Tumblr is kind of a big deal.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lym8miYRrB1qav3uso1_500.jpg)
marc:
:-)David Karp, founder of Tumblr, on the cover of WIRED UK Magazine
So which member of Oasis do you think David most closely resembles?
It’s official, Tumblr is kind of a big deal.
When I asked Karp about this and told him that I find ‘missing-e’ to be a useful product that enhances my experience with Tumblr, he told me that people using the extension assume that the issues that creep up are not from the extension but are caused by Tumblr, adding unnecessary burden to their support staff. According to Karp, the ‘missing-e’ is one of many extensions, and not even the most popular one, that Tumblr is forced to support.From Anthony De Rosa’s piece on/interview with David Karp and Tumblr. Question to Karp and Tumblr: If it’s a support issue first, why not just have Jeremy Cutler emphasize that the burden’s on him to support Missing e? Why chop off the entire arm when it appears a scratch is the problem? A disappointing take. (The piece covers other things as well, BTW.)
He hopes to be making money this year. Tumblr recently launched a directory where bloggers could pay for listings. The $5 slots sold out too fast, so the company pulled the feature and plans to relaunch it soon with more categories and a bidded marketplace.
So essentially, the reason the directory disappeared from the home page was not because it was a bad feature that they were getting rid of, but because they weren’t properly monetizing it. Also of note: The overarching theme is that David Karp was in over his head and ran his company very frugally for a long time … a frugality that led to Tumblr’s downtime in October.
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