tumblr profitability discourse spiralling into weird places tbh. let's recentre:
- It's a pure burn rate problem based on how prohibitively expensive it is to run a social network. It doesn't have to do with debt or having taken too much VC money or any of the normal stuff, this company is almost 20 years old and the current owner bought it at fire-sale prices.
- Making Tumblr a premium advertising destination is probably a necessary step to making it profitable to run, simply because you can't make a subscription-only social network and ad revenue scales with use in a way that other revenue streams do not.
- Nonetheless, other revenue streams are very helpful, and it's worth chipping in to them in the principle of "I get a lot of value out of the site and want to support it" or "I wanted them to have a little walkin'-around money", if that's your vibe.
- Don't do this if you'll feel cheated if the site folds anyway, or if you expect the site to treat you substantially better in exchange, because that's not how it works! you're just throwing a bit of your own money in the hole in solidarity with the larger throwing-money-in-a-hole project.
- And you can mention that you're paying and explain why but for heaven's sake don't try to peer pressure other people into paying for the site, frame not paying as shameful, or imply that paying will save the site, that stuff is embarrassing. It's unlikely to be pivotal one way or another, and it will always be a tiny minority of users who pay for the site: social media needs the network effects of a big mass of free users, and "everything is free—but watch out" has been the fundamental business model of the internet basically since it went mainstream.





