<story><title>Tumblr’s stumbles under Yahoo</title><url>http://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gnicholas</author><text>Their ad strategy sure did suck. I know this because I really wanted to advertise on Tumblr since many of their users were already posting about my startup and driving tons of traffic (tens of thousands of page views, from posts with 100k+ notes) to my website.&lt;p&gt;I contacted their ad team and was told the minimum ad buy was $25k. I explained the situation and said that given the popularity of our product among the Tumblr community, I had no doubt we could find a revenue-positive way to advertise on Tumblr, but that we couldn&amp;#x27;t commit to $25k sight-unseen. I never heard back from them.&lt;p&gt;Considering how easy it is to advertise on Google or FB with just a couple bucks, I was shocked that Tumblr is so inflexible. I guess it&amp;#x27;s not surprising they couldn&amp;#x27;t get to $100M in ad revenue, since they&amp;#x27;ll only talk to companies that can afford $25k experiments.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tumblr’s stumbles under Yahoo</title><url>http://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ivraatiems</author><text>This article wholly ignores the rampant technical problems with Tumblr and the way that every &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; for them makes the platform worse. Whether it&amp;#x27;s removing the ability to post reply chains, the completely broken Web and mobile interfaces, the haphazard rollout of new features, the sudden and unhelpful modifications to the search function&amp;#x27;s behavior, or the continuous useless pushes for people who are just reading blogs to instead make a Tumblr of their own, the site is far, far off track from where it should be development-wise. Yeah, ads are annoying, and I can&amp;#x27;t imagine Yahoo has helped matters, but I think the feelings of Tumblr&amp;#x27;s user base on how it&amp;#x27;s being modified are a large contributing factor in its decline.&lt;p&gt;Another factor is the failure of Tumblr&amp;#x27;s staff to appreciate the diversity of ways Tumblr can be used: as a picture blog, as a server status log, as a way of communicating person to person, as a way of communicating person to corporation, as a way of creating funny writing projects or online roleplaying, or just as a content aggregator. All of these are valuable uses of the platform. Not all of them are ever accepted or catered to, in fact, most of them are ignored.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d like to see more on why Tumblr&amp;#x27;s dev team does what it does than on why its ads team sucks.</text></comment>