In an interview with the Financial Times Tumblr CEO David Karp revealed his plans for getting the company, which lets people post all manner of personal files like pictures on the Internet, as much as $100 million a year in revenue.
Apparently Mr. Karp believes that it is possible to get that amount in funds not from competing head to head with other web sites, but by poaching advertisers from television networks.
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at [email protected].
Thank you.
This should make Yahoo’s shareholders happy as the company dropped $1 billion last year in acquiring Tumblr.
Tumblr lets its users post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from their browsers, phones, desktops, email or wherever they happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML.
In that way it differs from Facebook which does not allow its users to control the appearance of their postings to that site. But the service still has a long way to go to catch up with the world’s number one social network.
Facebook has almost 1.5 billion users and Tumblr claims only about 400 million monthly active users. But the Tumblr CEO believes that his company has a better chance of wooing firms that currently rely on television advertising. This is because, as Karp explained, Tumblr’s users have a different intent when they come to the site then Facebook users.
Facebook users, he said, just want to communicate with their friends, whereas, Tumblr users are more interested in its content which includes 210 million blogs.
As Karp explained to The Financial Times, “The whole industry is obsessed with harvesting intent when, if you look at the biggest brands, they want to create intent, to get people to aspire to wear the clothes, drive the car, drink the soda. Right now there aren’t a lot of places in any of these digital networks which inspire people to become a customer . . . which they used to do with great TV and print campaigns.”
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has gone on record as agreeing with the $100 million figure. But she also acknowledged that Tumblr will not turn a net profit before 2015.
