the thing that always gets in my way when i try to imagine what’s the best method for changing how Tumblr is run

is that i don’t actually know what motivation has been keeping it going so far.

And getting reliable answers when looking this sort of thing up is practically impossible, especially these days

It’s not necessarily money, at least not in the sense that comes most naturally to the mind

Because from what I’ve always read about social media companies, they have an extraordinarily hard time actually making any profit

like, the business model might be “sell ads on people’s social media pages” but that doesn’t bring in enough money on its own. advertisers won’t pay much per page they advertise on, because ads don’t really bring them much profit per view

And running any website costs money, especially if there’s a lot of people using it (especially if they’re making posts, which someone has to moderate)

And if the ads don’t bring in more money than that costs, you gotta branch out into selling other things

which i guess often includes selling user data (whatever kind of data someone will pay for– again the value of that seems kinda variable and uncertain, and it tends not to be talked about as publicly as other stuff, so idk how much profit that brings)

And then there’s selling premium memberships, which i would suppose only becomes viable if enough of your userbase 1. has the money for it, and 2. considers the premium features worth paying for, and 3. doesn’t hate your management enough to want to boycott paying you for anything

And it really kinda seems to me that Tumblr fails on all of these possible revenue sources. We are not, in general, a profitable userbase– either to be sold to, or to sell access to anything we have

now of course I don’t know all of Tumblr, and there may be parts of it that are more profitable than anything I see

Or there may be other sources of revenue, like rich investors somewhere, pouring loads of money into it, in hopes it’ll someday pay off (like what’s going on with Uber and Lyft) …but really i doubt it, for Tumblr

And I’m not convinced that it is supporting itself, in any way. Last I heard, Facebook did become actually profitable, but it took years of operating at a loss, solely on investor funds, to figure out how to get to that point (via sales of ads and user data). Tumblr is nowhere near Facebook’s level of corporate efficiency.

Which makes it a much more tolerable site, but much less understandable how it still exists.

What is supporting it right now? And just how precarious is that, whatever it is?

Anyway, whatever is keeping it alive, something about the backlash to this particular recent update threatened it enough to convince the owners to change course, at least for now

But… was it because Tumblr users themselves bring profit by staying here (through ads, personal data sales, premium subscriptions)?

Or because the reputation of having a site full of satisfied users is valuable to … whoever else they’re getting actual non-negligible amounts of money from?

Or something else?

None of the possibilities seem to add up, as far as I can understand.

….but I admit I’m not an expert on adding up this kind of BS. And so I don’t really know.

Not sure why I’m even going on about this.

Except…. whenever I see people talking about the motivations behind all this, they always seem to be talking from the assumption that Tumblr makes a ton of profit, and that this comes mainly from advertising to us.

And I don’t have enough information, or even know how to get enough information, to figure out how true or untrue that may be

But there’s something about it that just… feels to me like it’s a dangerous assumption to make.