Tumblr started putting on their dashboard. Yahoo's strategy for monetizing tumblr's is to show ads to the people who are providing free content to the site.
If it works. More power to them.
As most of the bloggers on tumblr are left leaning sheep, the site added this snippy phrase to their about the ads section:
"A post-consumerist society built on an economy of surplus instead of
scarcity would enable Yahoo and Tumblr to procure both labor and
materials at zero marginal cost."
The hint here is that if we had a Marxist economy, then Tumblr would be free.
The truth is that if we had a Marxist society, most of us would be hungry and most of the free spirits who use tumblr would be spending their days in Gulags and not on Google.
The original business model of Tumblr was the model of the Dotbust economy. The company would build an ad free site. Concentrate on building a user base then sell out to a mainstream company that would then have to figure out how to monetize the site.
When one looks at Tumblr from a broad perspective, what David Karp did was actually quite evil.
Tumblr has people spending millions of uncompensated man hours "reblogging" content from other sites, with only a few people at the very top of the pyramid receiving any rewards. I suspect that much of the content found on tumblr was taken without permission of the copyright holder.
To build its user base, Tumblr actively encouraged people to upload and pirate pornography. Tumblr feeds porn addictions, and I fear that many people have been abused in the last few years as tumblr addicts abused friends and acquaintances to create tumblr porn.
From an economic perspective. Tumblr is one of the many constructs on the Internet that takes wealth from the people at large and concentrates it in a few greedy hands. The corporate executives who created Tumblr being among the greediest.
The mindless drones railing with hatred against the one percent are doing so on a site created by and for the one percent.
Personally, I don't fault Tumblr for Greed. I do fault them for duplicity for spouting out Marxist nonsense along side their ad.
Tumblr's business strategy is to make money by displaying ads to the people who are creating free content for their site.
The people who provide free content might receive some kudos from their peers, but receive little in the way of financial compensation for their effort. Tumblr takes from the many and gives to the few.
I realize that Tumblr has to apologize to its users for the ad.
Personally, I hate this thing were people have to apology for showing ads on a web site as if trying to make money off one's actions is a sin against Gaia.
If we really wanted a better society, then we should engage in a dialog about how we could structure the internet so that people throughout our society could benefit financially through the Internet.
Personally, I like the blogspot model better than Tumblr. Blogspot encourages bloggers to put a Google Ad on their site. Both the blogger and Google can make a little money from the ad. I also love the affiliate model where web sites can many money by selling products online.
This game where people are supposed to apologize for trying to make money is absurd. It hurts the hard working honest people who are upfront about their actions while piling riches on power on the manipulators of our society.
NOTE: I joined Tumblr in 2013 (shortly before its acquisition by Yahoo!) I decided to create a selection of tumblr blogs with images from the Mountain West. You can see a list of the Community Color tumblr sites here. My sites have reblogged about 7000 images. I think my sites are quite pretty. Here are pictures of the Grand Canyon, Here are pictures of Arches National Park and here are pictures from Rocky Mountain National Park.
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