Tumblr Has Not Been Monetized

One Way of Thinking about WhatsApp’s Staggering Price

Tumblr Monetization: Sell To Yahoo

Image by Matthew Buchanan / Flickr via CrunchBase

You have to be crazy about Tumblr to truly understand its appeal. It is half way there between Blogger/Wordpress and Twitter and, to its hard core users, more fulfilling than both. You can't amass a huge audience and not be able to monetize it. But this sale to Yahoo means monetization can wait some more.

Marissa Mayer failed to buy FourSquare as a Google executive, but she has managed to buy Tumblr as the Yahoo Chief. Both are companies that have helped put New York City on the tech map.

Last I met David Karp was during Social Media Week. This validation is well deserved. Now Karp and team get to nurture the local tech ecosystem some. I am assuming the Tumblr team will stay put in the city. I don't think it wants to wear "f----g Dropbox T-shirts!"

Karp, I have a clean energy idea that I need some seed money for. Are you in? :)

The billion Yahoo paid it will get back in the stock market reward to the Yahoo stock from the cool factor from Tumblr to the Yahoo brand. So basically this web property has been had for free. It is win win. This is also a strong signal to young and happening tech entrepreneurs that Yahoo is a brand that can be trusted with sexy acquisitions. That is worth at least another billion.

Fred Wilson must be very happy. You couldn't get near that guy without him gushing about David Karp at least once. Now you have concrete proof what it was all about.

David Karp showing up at Yahoo is like Arianna Huffington showing up at AOL, only I don't think Karp will outshine Mayer. She is a hotshot herself, very much so.

Yahoo buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion, vows not to screw it up

The deal is expected to increase Yahoo's audience by 50 percent. ..... Shares of Yahoo rose in early trading on Monday but quickly gave up those gains and were little changed at $26.54. Through Friday's close, they had risen 70 percent since Mayer became CEO. ..... David Karp, 26, who founded Tumblr in 2007 and will remain CEO. ...... Karp, a self-taught programmer who left high school in favor of home schooling ..... his take in the billion-dollar sale would top $200 million. .... "There are a lot of rich people in the world. There are very few people who have the privilege of getting to invent things that billions of people use," he said.

Update: I think Karp will buy a plane.

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Pinterest Is Coming Along

“It is usually the case that people gravitate to services that match their interests and their needs. Some of the more popular subjects on Pinterest are likely to be especially interesting to women, such as food, fashion, interior decorating and design,” said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and co-author of the study....... Food is the fastest growing category on Pinterest and generates the most repins...... To put Pinterest’s user base into perspective, Pew researchers found that 66% of U.S. adults are on Facebook, 20% are on LinkedIn, and 16% are on Twitter. Pinterest has surpassed Tumblr, which is used by 5% of U.S. adults. Instagram has also developed a sizable user base, with 12% of all adults now using the mobile photo-sharing app.

Source

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Medium: Kind Of Like Pinterest

What does a "re-imagined" publishing platform look like? A bit like Tumblr, with a pinch of Pinterest and a sprinkling of Reddit's ranking system. .... "Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be."

takes submitted content such as text and photos and organizes related items in collections that multiple people can review and add to. Instead of being listed chronologically, posts getting the highest user rating will appear at the top

a collaborative, lightweight way to express themselves online with images and text ..... people should be able to publish without “the burden of becoming a blogger” and worrying about developing an audience. The layout looks a lot like Pinterest, but contributions include both pictures and text. .... Currently, anyone with a Twitter account can read and provide feedback on the new platform but only a limited group of invited friends and family can post.

Medium is seemingly put together with parts from other sites: posting is simple and template-based, like Tumblr. Posts are organized into collections, like Pinterest. And within those collections, the posts are promoted by readers, like Reddit.....

The site's interface may be its strong suit.... As for written content, the site is fundamentally no different than Slashdot. .... Obvious used a Tumblr post to announce Branch, a tool designed to facilitate conversation online.

Web-based discussion site Branch...... a simple way to post to the Internet without taking on the responsibility of a personal blog brand. .... combines "the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the Internet." .... hopes to turn Internet monologues into online dialogues ..... By allowing users to pick who they want to talk to, Branch opens the diversity of the Web but prevents the discussion from turning into Internet noise. .... "We want it to be a place for you to talk about all the things that are happening in your world."

called "the next big thing in Web publishing" .... The reason this is different than the tools around today, like Tumblr or Twitter or Word Press is that it supposedly values quality, while also lowering the barrier to being a blogger. .... Medium will make the Internet easy, beautiful, and high quality all at once. .... Who gets the book deal for the Been There, Loved That, for example? ..... Medium looks and works like Pinterest, Tumblr and Reddit. Tech blogger Mathew Ingram called it "a cross between Tumblr and Pinterest" ..... "Right now it just seems like a Frankensteinish PinTumblReddit," wrote Gizmodo's Mario Aguilar. It's a blog that sorts things differently than blogs out there today. ..... "There are seeds of a backlash against the beautiful chaos the web hath wrought, the desire for a flight to quality. There will be new ways beyond ease of use to harness the creative powers of the audience," writes Benton. Even if Medium doesn't define that revolution, it reminds us that the Internet is not dead, and that it continues to evolve.

Both platforms seem to be very optimistic in nature, aiming to get each and everyone of us to share our ideas and thoughts in a clean and productive way.

With Medium, they aim to inject a dose of collaboration into Web publishing and distance it from print publishing practices. They also want to raise the quality of content.

Through Medium, readers and contributors alike, are able to interact with one another at a “level of contribution they prefer.”

an embeddable discussion platform called Branch. .... he is widely credited as the inventor of the term “blog” itself .... Obvious focuses on Internet software and “systems that help people work together to make the world a better place”. Besides developing its own projects, it also invests into promising, “philosophically aligned” start-ups, such as Beyond Meat – the company which aspires to perfectly replace animal protein with plant protein. ..... The project mixes blogging and social networking, borrowing ideas from Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter and pretty much any other successful Internet media platform. Posts can contain text and pictures, and are displayed using modern, minimalistic design. .... Medium aggregates posts by topic instead of by author, and assembles them into “collections”. Every post can be rated by users, and highest-rated posts will always appear on top of a collection. ..... should be equally appealing to both the casual readers and dedicated bloggers. .... Branch – an online discussion platform that has been described as “Twitter with no character limit”. Branch can be embedded to any website, and host discussions or comments on any topic. But the most interesting feature is that any conversation can “branch” into separate posts. .... it is interesting to note that some features and the overall design of Medium look somewhat similar to recently relaunched Digg.

They inspired a boom in self-publishing with Blogger, then turned the world to 140 characters with Twitter. Now Ev Williams and Biz Stone have launched two new websites – Medium and Branch – in what they hope will prompt an "evolutionary leap" in online sharing. .... people can read, view and vote on content without worrying about developing their own audience. .... Branch is the place for Twitter users to have more in-depth conversations with each other. You can start your own "branch" and invite other Twitter users to join you. There is no need to set up a separate Branch account. .... "Between articles, blog posts, and tweets, the internet is dominated by monologues. So we want to build a home for dialogues online, by combining the intimacy of a dinner table conversation with the power of the internet." ..... Branch brings the simplicity of Twitter and a more expansive, specialist conversation that can be found on Quora. Its success is more likely to be judged on the quality of conversations and return rate of its users, rather than the number of sign-ups. ..... Medium is not meant to be a repository for the badly-lit photos of a bazillion users. ..... What will be interesting is how both Medium and Branch affect Tumblr, the lightweight blogging platform whose biggest threat is being overwhelmed by low-quality content posted without a second thought.

"While it's great that you can be a one-person media company, it'd be even better if there were more ways you could work with others." .... Williams, Stone and Goldman were also investors in Branch Media, a New York startup that came out of private beta Monday. .... Stone, meanwhile, has a side project: He's signed with camera-maker Canon U.S.A. to work with acclaimed Hollywood director Ron Howard to produce one of five short films that will be based on photos sent in by consumers.

Is Medium going to be as revolutionary? That seems unlikely — but it’s still interesting. .... collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on .... What else is Pinterest but a collaboration platform .... while the Obvious founders say they want to make it easier for people to publish and share content, you could argue that Tumblr pretty much has a lock on that phenomenon ..... Of course, both of the things Evan Williams is famous for also looked either unnecessary or unimpressive, and in some cases both. Blogger was cool if you were a geek and wanted your own website, but it was far from obvious at the time that self-publishing was going to become something huge or crack open the media industry in a fundamental way. And Twitter looked so ephemeral (not to mention the ridiculous name) that many people dismissed it as a plaything for nerds that would never amount to anything. .... it looks a lot like a mashup of Pinterest and Tumblr. .... one of the things the platform does that is unlike both Blogger and Twitter is it subverts the notion of the author as the most important thing about the content. .... Medium is focused more on the value of the content, regardless of who is producing it or voting on it. .... it feels like a mashup of all the other tools that are out there rather than something with a compelling feature of its own .... certainly an interesting piece of an ongoing puzzle.

Obvious–a sort of idea incubator that’s “more of a philosophy than a company or product”

it is based around well-designed templates like Tumblr, and can be heavy on images, like Pinterest. ..... For now, Medium sounds like a potentially large collection of online forums, not much more. Yet, given the meteoric track record of its developers in the past, Medium has a much better than average chance of success. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Medium can reach anywhere near the level of success that Twitter has enjoyed.

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens, the finest poet to ever serve as vice president of the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company.] .... Obvious is the most recent iteration of the company that created Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter. .... Odeo was a podcasting service that never really took off — 20 percent ahead of its time, 80 percent outflanked by Apple. ..... the underlying structure of Medium, which upends much of how we think about personal publishing online. .... When the Internet first blossomed, its initial promise to media was the devolution of power from the institution to the individual. Before the web, reaching an audience meant owning a printing press or a broadcast tower. It was resource-intensive, and those resources tended to congeal around companies ..... The political blogosphere — the cacophony of individual voices on both left and right circa, say, 2004 — evolved toward institutions, toward Politico and TPM and The Blaze and HuffPo and the like. ..... Personal publishing is like voting. In theory, it’s the very definition of empowerment. In reality, it’s an excellent way for your personal shout to be cancelled out by someone else’s shout. ..... That was when a few smart people realized that there was a balance to be found between the organization and the individual. The individual sought self-expression and an audience; the organization sought sustainability and cash money. ...... What’s most radical about Medium is that it denies authorship. ..... it degrades authorship, renders it secondary, knocks it off its pedestal ..... The shift to blogging created a wave of new individual media stars, but in a sense it just shifted traditional media brands to a new, personal level. ..... Sites like Buzzfeed are built largely on reshuffling the Internet, rearranging work into streams and slideshows. ..... When you click on an author’s byline on a Medium post, it goes to their Twitter feed (Ev synergy!), not to their author archive — which is what you’d expect on just about any other content management system on the Internet. ...... “Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category.” .... Medium’s posting interface brought back super-pleasant memories of Blogger’s old two-pane interface. Felt like the Clinton years again. ..... The mass of quality content is much higher too, of course, but it’s surrounded by an even-faster-growing mass of not-so-great (or at least not-so-great-to-you) content. ....... Medium believes in editorial judgment — but everyone’s an editor. ..... good stuff being buried beneath something inconsequential posted 20 minutes later ..... Branch is based on the idea that web comments are shit and that you have to create a separate universe where smart people can have smart conversations. App.net, the just-funded paid Twitter alternative, is attractive to at least some folks because it promises a reboot of the social web without the “cockroaches” — you know, stupid people. Svbtle, an invite-only blogging platform, is aimed only at those who “strive to produce great content. We focus on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is a distraction.” ....... modernized with nice typography, lovely textures, and generous white space ..... the white flight argument — the idea that the privileged flee common spaces and platforms once they stop being solely the realm of an elite and become too popular ..... That the web’s pressure to Always Keep Posting New Stuff leads to a lot of dumb stuff being posted. It’s a critique of pageview chasing, a critique of linkbait, a critique of content farms, a critique of SEO’d headlines — a yearning for something more authentic ..... Is this Blogger or Twitter, or is it Odeo?

Branch I find more intriguing. I don't know what it is.

Collaborative publishing might save Medium. That might be the opening.

I might share photos on Medium to see if they rise up the ranks! Once they allow me in, that is.

This is the best commentary on Medium of all that I read.

Nieman Lab: 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious

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Tumblr Spam

Dating In The 80s, Pre eHarmony

Via Wiktor Macura

The Best NYTM After Party Ever

I have been to numerous NY Tech MeetUps over the years. Biggies like Tumblr and FourSquare have all demoed at the NYTM. I don't remember Tumblr's presentation though. Maybe that was a MeetUp I missed. (Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him, Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?)

I started going to the NYTM when it was six people at a bar on the Lower East Side, one of them the MeetUp.com CEO. And that was only a few years ago.

I have said several times at this blog that Digital Dumbo beats the NYTM after party. No more. Not after last night. (Digital Dumbo 18: The Dumbo Loft)

What made the difference?

It was not at a bar. It was in the same building. You left the hall and you went upstairs. When people have to walk three blocks to the after party, many of them leave.

The space was huge.

Free drinks, free food. Worth seeking out sponsors.

And that was pretty much it.

I think the NYTM should stick to this venue forever.

Following 2700 People On Google Plus

Image via WikipediaA few weeks back I discovered this list. That gave me a start of sorts on Google Plus, even though I still don't show up daily like I do on Facebook and Twitter and Gmail of course.

It is like I signed up for Tumblr early, not long after it was launched, because I read about it in the news. And then I forgot about it. When someone convinced me to "get on Tumblr" I believe in February 2010, when I went to sign up, there already was a user by that name, and that was me. But Tumblr for me took off when I came across a list by David Noel. I ended up following most people on the list. These were tech entrepreneurs and VCs.

I have gone passive on Tumblr since summer. I still reblog once in a while, but I probably came across the tumblog post somewhere else. My primary blogs hosted on Blogger still feed into my Tumblr, so I still provide fresh content.

When I show up on Google Plus, my stream always surprises me. I follow so many great quality people. If I want some intellectual company, Google Plus is that place. Google Plus has displaced Tumblr for me for now. Even though I got inactive on Tumblr before Google Plus came along, and I am not doing the daily thing yet on Google Plus that I used to do on Tumblr.

Google Plus does not compete with Facebook, just like Twitter does not, Tumblr does not. They occupy different spaces. It is like when I got active on Quora I realized the FourSquare guys were on there, active. On Google Plus that person has been Alexis Ohanian. I see him often in my NY Tech circle. He is there, and he responds. I think he circled me back.

I mean, there is the MIT Media Lab circle, for instance. Joi Ito is really something. And it is an honor to be able to follow his crew.

Meeting David Karp

@paramendra
Paramendra Bhagat@davidkarp It was good to meet you in the 1 train on the Upper West Side a few hours ago. I am glad you liked my hat. :-)
Nov 20 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

@davidkarp
David Karp "90% of the mail I get is positive and encouraging, and only 10% is death threats." - Jimmy Justice on... http://t.co/3wqGeNRv
Nov 17 via TumblrFavoriteRetweetReply

@davidkarp
David Karp "I know Nick Gray!" - If I had a dollar… http://t.co/c2nXvsAQ
Nov 18 via TumblrFavoriteRetweetReply

@davidkarp
David Karp "I don’t want to hang out with other programmers. I want to hang out with Jay Z. I want people to be..." http://t.co/kDSBRhax
Nov 19 via TumblrFavoriteRetweetReply

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Tumblr: Casey, Nina, David, Fred



I was wearing my hat which is not the fanciest hat around.

Race, Gender, Tech

Image via WikipediaGroup dynamics is the number one thing I bring to the table for work. And there gender as a topic stands out. And I don't even mean in a political way. It is fascinating as a topic like stars might fascinate astrophysicists.

The zen of tech makes it even more possible to see the threads of race and gender. In a city where the subway ride is cheap, even at free events why do you end up seeing a room that is almost all people of one kind? Culture is a powerful force. Like Facebook did not create the social graph, it merely mapped it, tech in general helps you see social threads.

The other day I saw a group photo of the Tumblr team somewhere and it was an all white team, and I noticed. My teams in India are all Indian. (Doubling Down On Tech Consulting) I was at an event in Jackson Heights on Friday and it was a room full of people from Nepal.

And you come across women who would like you to believe they are on the cutting edge of things like the glass ceiling, only it simply does not involve a single white male they might personally know. Or when a white woman does her racist bonding thing with a white male to portray you as The Other. The same platform also is open to acts of sexist bonding, but do you really want to go for that? But then corporate warfare has its twists and turns. And the Internet is globalization on steroids. A billion Indians would not be my idea of a minority.

Permanent War

Tumblr: Ease Of Use?

Image via CrunchBaseTumblr has been in the news for having surpassed Wordpress. Tumblr surpassed both Blogger and Wordpress in page hits months back. Looks like it has now surpassed Wordpress on some other metric that shall remain unnamed by me.

What is it? There is the itch to explain. The pundits are pouring in.

I have a feeling analyzing might not work. Unless you use Tumblr, you will not get it. I myself was late to the party, but now I show up every day, most every day. Tumblr completes me.



And Tumblr still is not my primary blogging platform. I am still stuck on Blogger. I do long form blogging. I pontificate. And Blogger allows me to play with a little bit of code. On Tumblr, I mostly reblog, I almost totally reblog. And yet Tumblr completes me like Blogger does not.

Music Places

Recently I have taken to listening to a whole bunch of music on Tumblr.

The Music Tag On Tumblr

Some great places to go for music are these, in no particular order.

HypeMachine
Last.fm
Pandora
World Singles Chart
Shuffler
Soundtracking
Spotify
ViddyJam
Song Of The Day
SoundCloud

Two Hall of Famers would be Soraya Darabi and Fred Wilson, people who stand out in the NY tech ecosystem regardless, but I don't think that is accidental, great thinking in tech seems to go hand in hand with voracious consumption of good music. So listen: listen. They have great taste. They are both addicted to music.

Social Media More So Than Social Gaming

Image via CrunchBaseKevin Slavin Sold His Company To Zynga
Meeting Kevin Slavin: Tumblr's Brilliance

In my leisurely talk with Kevin Slavin yesterday, we touched upon many topics. On my part I was very eager to get out of him the Area/Code story. And I did. He relayed how it was two people for a year. And how they grew organically for a few good years until they got bought by Zynga, and now his team is Zynga's New York City branch.

And of course we talked microfinance a bunch, which is why we were meeting in the first place. Here was a social gaming master. And so I brought up the topic of putting social gaming to the service of microfinance. And he said he was not so sure gaming was a good fit for microfinance.

We both agreed social media can play a much larger role than social gaming when it came to microfinance.

The Music Tag On Tumblr

Image by Matthew Buchanan / Flickr via CrunchBaseTumblr sucked me in somewhere along the way. I am on Tumblr pretty much every day, often times more than once a day. When I need to take time off work, I often end up on Tumblr.

A recent addition to my Tumblr experience has been the music tag. Suddenly it feels like I am reaching out to humanity. Music is the most obvious of tags. Often times I come across some music clip that I most certainly have never heard of, I might not even hear a second time, I might never have come across on my own. And I reblog. And often times I am the first person to reblog a clip by someone. And it feels like I am saying hello to strangers who could perhaps use a hello.

Music has fast become my favorite tag on Tumblr. There is always something to listen to. And I dig the randomness of the whole experience.

Mike Hudack Wearing Makeup

Caro, Get Off The Summit,That's A Volcano

On Tumblr

Just Found Out Mike Hudack Is Also A High School Dropout
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