Before everyone flocked to Facebook, and then later abandoned it, leaving older users to argue amongst themselves and share fake news, there was Tumblr.

The one-time darling of social media was launched in 2007 by founder David Karp, who dropped out of high school at age 15, and managed to get Tumblr up and running when he was 20.

At the peak of its powers, the site boasted an incredible 20 billion page views a month (for a point of comparison, News24 had 73 million in July of this year), and the site was hot property.

Well, that didn’t last.

Here’s the Telegraph:

It was such hot property that Yahoo decided to buy for $1.1bn (£910m) in 2013.

Today, however, page views have fallen to just 400m per month and this week the site was brought for less than $3m by Wordpress owner Automattic – just 0.27pc of its original price.

From $1,1 billion to less than $3 million in the space of six years is an incredible fall from grace.

Clearly, Yahoo paid over the odds for the company:

That sale price seemed grossly inflated and implied that Tumblr would continue to be the dominant online community which it had been for years.

At the time Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer faced a battle to save not just Yahoo but her own credibility.

The former Google executive had been brought in to revitalise the ailing internet company and she hit upon a strategy of making expensive, flashy acquisitions as a way to breathe new life into Yahoo…

The deal was unquestionably a victory for Tumblr founder David Karp [above]. The executive triumphantly emailed his employees joking that “we’re not turning purple” by embracing Yahoo’s corporate colour. “F–k yeah,” he wrote at the end of the email.

F**k yeah is right, David, and Marissa Mayer, who left Yahoo in 2017, is going to take some heat over that decision for years to come.

On top of overpaying, Tumblr’s sponsored posts – the money maker for any social media site – flopped:

Advertisers looking to get their products in front of Tumblr users’ eyes didn’t have a wealth of options to choose from.

Today, they can create branded augmented reality experiences on Snapchat or hyper-targeted ads on Facebook, but Tumblr’s sponsored posts and home page takeovers were decidedly basic.

An anonymous former Tumblr executive told Digiday in 2017 that “Yahoo never gave Tumblr the time and support to innovate ad products. By the time Yahoo realised how far in the race Tumblr fell behind, it was already too late.”

There’s a third factor at play, and many say it may have been the most decisive of all.

Sex sells:

Tumblr happily played host to thousands of NSFW (not safe for work) blogs where users could publish and share pornography freely.

In December, Tumblr and its then-owner Verizon announced that the site’s lax rules around nudity were coming to an end: Pornography was banned on Tumblr…

Tumblr’s pornography ban was widely seen as a death knell for its thriving community. Users migrated to other social networks en masse and its traffic fell nearly 30pc in the months following the ban.

A quite stunning example of when attempting to take the moral high ground (we say attempting because there’s nothing wrong with porn) backfires spectacularly.

Washington Post with more on why the pornography ban was such a death knell:

Until the ban, sex-focused subcultures and pornography had been tacitly allowed on the site. One BuzzFeed reporter estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of blogs that would be shut down, plus millions of individual posts containing adult content….

Tumblr had long been considered a safe space for exploring identity. But some creators said Tumblr’s ban eliminated a place where LGBT communities and other people with marginalized gender and sexual identities found support.

“It was a safe space for me to explore things online that I would not necessarily want to try [in] real life, where that might not be safe realistically,” one user, who called himself Mutabear on Tumblr and asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions, told Ohlheiser. “More importantly, it was a way for me to connect with other like-minded people.” Mutabear told his followers he was leaving the site after the ban announcement.

Clearly, Mutabear wasn’t alone.

I wonder how much value Facebook would instantly lose if it banned parents from posting about their children, or people who do good deeds from letting everyone know that they just did a good deed.

#faithinhumanityrestored.

[sources:telegraph&washpost]