this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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It's still around, and doing quite well at least from a community perspective. It's an underdog platform and the users want to keep it that way for the most part. The problem, though, is that the staff don't know how to monetize it properly. The thing they push the most is an ad-free subscriptions service which is already doomed to fail because everyone uses adblockers.
They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr's own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.
Tumblr's biggest roadblock to monetization isn't their site structure or ideas, it's their community.
They also tried taking advantage of that by enabling pvp through ads. Like making you able to promote other people's posts or to give them a bazillion checkmarks
The term "enabling PVP" was suggested by Tumblr users because of the aggressive attitude the community would have towards sponsored posts. As you can expect, nobody wants to spend money to be harassed, and terms like this turn people off spending money on the site.
I don't understand why Tumblr admins embrace the factors that make spending money on Tumblr bad, instead of culling the free users who attack paying users. It's not even like the remaining Tumblr users can revolt. They're hated by the rest of the internet, they don't have anywhere else to go and they don't have the tech know-how to set up their own site. Tumblr can't expect to maintain their "unique website culture" and make money at the same time.