The question of the weekend is: "Why did Yahoo! spend one-third of their cash on hand to buy a company that by all accounts is about to run out of money?"
And here are some fairly sober answers, including: "if you were given 1.1 billion dollars, would you be able to build a service used by more than ten million people for more than an hour a month? You could not. That's a bigger audience than American Idol, or for that matter anything else (except Facebook or Twitter)." That's very attractive!
Jessica Grose: We're here to talk about hate-blogs. In my novel, Sad Desk Salad (shameless self promotion alert), the heroine and her coworkers at a women's website called Chick Habit are plagued by a hate-blogger who reblogs their posts and puts up incriminating, embarrassing personal information about them.
For those who aren't familiar with the phenomenon, hate-blogs are an actual thing. I based the hate-blog in my book (Breaking the Chick Habit, or BTCH) on the hate-blogs I had read up till then: The ones about Jezebel, the Pioneer Woman, and Julia Allison.
I asked you to join me in this chat because you’ve covered [...]
A wonderful new feature on Tumblr means that you can destroy peoples' lives! For just $5, you can "pin" something to people's "dashboard," and these "pinned posts" don't go away until you "unpin" them. It's basically MADE for trolls. (Also, do you think people born after 1990 know what a pushpin is?)
$85 million sounds like a lot of money! That's what Tumblr just raised, on top of the $30 million they raised ten months ago, bringing their investment dollars to a bit north of $120 million. There's a staff of 50 (now only 82% male!), so that's like $5 million a year right there. (Also, they've outsourced tech support (rather poorly; if you ask Tumblr for help with something, you get some dude copying and pasting a manual at you) with some minimal supervision, and that's probably a significant, if user-annoying, cost savings.) But staff costs are surely dwarfed by the cost of doing at the very [...]
Mark Ghuneim and David Peris dug up this delicious chestnut from January, 1999: "Internet search engine Yahoo! Inc. confirmed Thursday it will buy GeoCities, a fast-growing Web site community, in a $3.6 billion deal that will further solidify Yahoo!'s position as a frontrunner in the online popularity contest." RIMSHOT.
Makes a billion dollars for Tumblr seem like a steal. Here's what I don't understand: who's blabbin' about the potential acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo!? Oh, gosh, whoever benefits from that. Tumblr made $13 million in 2012, so $1,000,000,000 sounds totally natural.
Oh, and how was GeoCities at the time of its Yahoo! acquisition? "In [...]
The Tumblr of Newsweek, which still exists, unlike Newsweek, and which is run by the DailyBeast "senior editor for social media," announced a new policy yesterday. "You pin, we unfollow" was the communiqué—by "pinning" they mean the Tumblr commerce initiative wherein, for a small fee, one can make a Tumblr post "adhere" to the top of each follower's dashboard until each follower "clicks" upon the post to make it disappear. (By "unfollow," they meant that they would no longer choose to receive said pinners' posts in their dashboard.) "The pins are like dashboard cockroaches. Turn on the lights every morning and unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin, unpin," the [...]
There are things in this world that need to be nurtured, cared for, and protected. Floating crates of mewing kittens, hatchling turtles disoriented by artificial lighting, baby seagulls ensnared by fishing nets. Likewise, we must nurture and care for Ketan Vora, the internet’s newest multinational rising star. Ketan is quickly gaining a following on Tumblr for his disarmingly friendly interactions, and his straightforward style of gifting tagged images of flower bouquets and sweets to his female (and, sometimes, male) fans.
Would you like to follow a music Tumblr devoted to the 80s, the "Minneapolis sound," and Prince-adjacent pop-funk? If the answer is "yes," then do enjoy. (If the answer is no, then look at your life choices.)
"For example, joking that you need to starve yourself after Thanksgiving or that you wanted to kill yourself after a humiliating date is fine, but recommending techniques for self-starvation or self-mutilation is not." —Hmm, this new Tumblr policy is… gonna get complicated. Tumblr users are, as should be expected, divided.
Rough day in new-media-land too: Tumblr's getting it from all sides, for pretty much extorting a developer—threatening to shut down his personal sites because they don't like a popular browser extension he made—and for not working well with fashion communities. C'mon boys! This kind of stuff is all easy to fix! Everyone's rooting for you.
In eighth grade, Mary liked Leonardo DiCaprio, Emily liked Paul McCartney, and I liked Gavin Rossdale. We probably didn't say liked, though, or even loved. We were obsessed, we were crazy, we swooned, we fantasized. We liked the mall, and love was a word for grandmothers on the telephone: they loved us, they hoped to see us soon. The feelings we had were much more gigantic and upsetting. Crush was good. It implied force, and pain, and the possibility that we might not make it out the other side intact.
At the time, I was pretty sure I had every picture of Gavin Rossdale ever published taped [...]
When you are launching some weird new Tumblr about mind-melting gifs, definitely you should always hire the Taiwanese animators at Next Media to make a bizarre preview video for you. No, what is Reblorg really? It's for fun things you've made: "Our submission rules are simple: you must have made it, and it must be new."
For a dollar, Tumblr will let you "highlight" your own Tumblr posts, which then… puts a sticker on the post that lets people know it's extra-important. Among the more negative (and not profane) comments are "This is actually ridiculous. Why would I even do that??" and "Well done staff, this is stupid and unnecessary." They will probably make a ton of one-dollars at this actually!
