Yeah, sorry I forgot Hacker News was all srs bznss where no humor is tolerated whatsoever.
On the Tumblr monetization front, TheStartupist[1] covers a good portion of their story. Checking Crunchbase[2] shows that they've gone through pretty large funding rounds, with their last one (D) at $30M the largest. I've been trolling Tumblr for the last year and half, and the only things I've been able to scrounge are the $9 Directory listing under your category of choice and the premium themes.
They're still growing massively, as all the cool kids congregate there to post their Instagram-faded pics of teenage angst, but are hemorrhaging money like Twitter. And like Twitter, advertising is viewed as pure evil[3] and not a viable solution to generate revenue. Twitter realized the inevitable and started Promoted Tweets recently, and Tumblr will have to do something similar soon as well. Maybe they make enough from the themes, but that seems a little quixotic.
On the Tumblr monetization front, TheStartupist[1] covers a good portion of their story. Checking Crunchbase[2] shows that they've gone through pretty large funding rounds, with their last one (D) at $30M the largest. I've been trolling Tumblr for the last year and half, and the only things I've been able to scrounge are the $9 Directory listing under your category of choice and the premium themes.
They're still growing massively, as all the cool kids congregate there to post their Instagram-faded pics of teenage angst, but are hemorrhaging money like Twitter. And like Twitter, advertising is viewed as pure evil[3] and not a viable solution to generate revenue. Twitter realized the inevitable and started Promoted Tweets recently, and Tumblr will have to do something similar soon as well. Maybe they make enough from the themes, but that seems a little quixotic.
[1]: http://thestartupist.com/2011/01/the-hypothetical-monetizati...
[2]: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tumblr
[3]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/04/tumblr-ad...