On the face of it, the notion of a premium tier for Tumblr isn’t necessarily absurd. Yes, it’s true that most Tumblr users are broke, but no competently managed premium blogging platform expects the majority of its users to pay in the first place; more typically, you’ll see about 1% of your user base with paid accounts – generally a mix of businesses that are using the site as their primary social media outreach platform, and folks with regular jobs who just want to be able to turn the ads off – while the other 99% make do with the ad-supported free version. The WordPress.com folks already run a premium blogging platform of their own, so they’re familiar with this usage pattern and aren’t going to have any unrealistic expectations there.
Now, whether the concomitant expectation that there will actually be businesses interested in using Tumblr as their primary social media outreach platform is absurd remains to be seen!
(Also, I’m seeing a lot of confusion in the notes about what WordPress.com actually is, so to clarify: WordPress is an open-source software package that anybody can install on their own web hosting and run a self-hosted blog. WordPress.com is a managed hosting service for WordPress blogs. It’s true that most standalone WordPress blogs are operated by businesses, owing to the expense and expertise required to deploy and maintain self-hosted blogging software. WordPress.com, however, consists mainly of non-commercial blogs, since all that’s taken care of for you.)
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #WordPress #adventures in human capitalism #yeah I don’t get why people are making such a (negative) fuss about the possibility of being able to give Tumblr money #increasingly these days I want at least the *option* of giving my service providers money #it aligns their incentives better than the alternative
Brinens and Things 