OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.
Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo.
So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the brand or the social aspect of the service. They can't truly crack down on it though, because that would reveal the truth: there isn't that much real use to justify the spending.
I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.
Maybe a future operator of Tumblr would feel differently -- but I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.
> I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.
I'm not really certain why you'd feel that way. Most ad agencies simultaneously have an adult wing and a mainstream wing because the truth is... most people in the world are adults, and sexuality is a large part of what we consider the human condition.
It's only natural that you'd pay for services and products to aid in that.
What's not done is mixing the content verticals. You have pornographic content, then you advertise Adam & Eve products, paysites, or one of the many clothing distributors that will never be seen in a local mall.
Ironically, since tumblr lets' you use your own templates---some people are successfully doing upsells via Tumblr using "in house" advertisements for companies.
Maybe Google would buy given that it's pretty much bombed out on photo sharing itself.
I really haven't found anything else quite like it, and I would hate to see it go away. I've been paying for my pro account for the last eight years.
But, yeah, it was popular for a time to dump on Flickr because they hadn't really moved forward. But truth be told, it pretty much does the job for me the way it is and I don't want a whole bunch of social stuff dumped on it.
Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.
Tumblr has a huge community and there are a large number of niche topics that have their biggest communities on Tumblr.
LiveJournal is a good comparison here - it never went away, is still popular in some communities (Runet), and is not worth very much money because most Internet users in the United States that advertisers care about decided to move on to other social networks.
I must be wrong, since Yahoo believes Tumblr increases its worth.
At this point there's the ArchiveTeam and that's about it, so we actually have something to point at when we're talking about what a great website that sure was back then.
From what I've seen (and I'll admit to not being overly familiar with either), WordPress and Tumblr are very different beasts with every different aims.
To answer your questions: yes and yes: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ (Not that I use it, but this functionality was implemented back in 2012).
If the Verizon deal falls through, I'd say "someone with the skill and resources to keep Tumblr running buying Tumblr, either together with other parts of Yahoo! or separately."
Why is there value? Honest question, just curious. Do myspace friends, for instance, still have value in today's day and age?