Caterpillar Cowboy

Sawickipedia says: The idea of tumblr hijacking users links likely won’t work.  Popular tumblogs will want the links for themselves so the minute tumblr hijacks the links - their top pubs leave.  Honestly they need to launch in stream advertising ala twitter and even then that likely pushes a number of top pubs to leave.  Anything that touches content - whether a post or link - pushes their pubs to Wordpress.  Yes tumblr is popular and that might be enough for someone desperate for growth (see Yahoo) but not sure there is an easy path here.

Now in fairness to tumblr - their team is so lean that don’t need a homerun revenue wise to make it work.  Might not equate to a $500MM exit (I sure hope Karp took money off the table) but tumblr will make it as a sustainable business.

(via sawickipedia

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What I had in mind is more that tumblr could offer e-commerce functionality within the post. So it’s seamless, like iTunes. No hijacking of links - it would be too disruptive of a user experience for the buyer, let alone the content creator.

I’ll admit, this thought experiment has made me a lot more bullish on their prospects than I was when I heard the news.

(via caterpillarcowboy)

Sawickipedia: One more thing I’m curious about - how much of their traffic comes from adult content.  It’s gotta be substantial.  WP doesn’t allow it all on WP.com so tumblr gets a lot.  I heard they pitched themselves as the long form twitter - part social net/ part pub platform.  Twitter has 100MM users publishing - Tumblr has a 48MM viewers - not publishers.  That’s an important point to think about.