Cool company Tumblr CEO seeking profitable entrepreneur hard to reach capital boost

Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/31848.html "> Light blog Tumblr is a typical cool company: David Karp was only 21 years old when he founded Tumblr, The company refused to go to the valley where everyone wanted to go, and rejected any form of advertising. Last year Tumblr posted a total of more than 16.5 billion posts, a total of more than 42.25 million bloggers and a company valued at more than 800 million dollars.

But recently David Karp made a really cool decision-TUMBLR ready to take the ad. For the way he had been refusing to advertise, Karp said, "That was a really stupid thing to do."

According to TUMBLR's advertising program, advertisers will be able to buy an ad portfolio on TUMBLR radar from May 2, TUMBLR Radar's best and most-watched posts next to Tumblr. This way advertisers will be able to post 120,000 times a day on a popular article page in the website.

Of course, this is not just a matter of cool, but an important decision that could affect the future of Tumblr. An important reason for Tumblr's refusal to advertise is that it can disrupt the core competitiveness of the site by worrying about the quality of the content. Before Tumblr profit way is mainly charge subject, binding private domain name.

David Karp's explanation for the incident was "it's time to seriously consider profitability," but everyone can see the problem of the sudden shift.

The timing is not right. Although the number of users, posts and blogs have reached a very high scale, but Tumblr did not form a strong position like Facebook or Taobao, the user's transfer cost is not high, there are posterous and other competitors. And with the surge in traffic over the past two years, the quality of posts on Tumblr has dropped markedly, and at such a point in time, the company should have focused on reducing the quality of the content, rather than making a profit. Because the core competitiveness of the company is content quality, not advertising.

Wrong direction. TUMBLR radar This old-fashioned advertising model will certainly affect the quality of the content, and the more the impact of advertising will be greater. Even if the initial control is effective, how much revenue does a company with a valuation of $800 million require? This actually creates a contradictory business model-the higher the income, the weaker the competitiveness. Even if you want to advertise, Tumblr should dig deeper into the data and do something interesting.

Influence culture. Twitter focuses on real-time information, and Facebook is the hub of social relations, and Tumblr has a unique aesthetic and language, mainly from elite blogs such as photographers, musicians and designers. From insisting on refusing advertising to promoting advertising, this is to some extent a cultural betrayal of the core user base. This could be the deadliest.

The problem is that these points are not so hard to imagine, so why would Tumblr do that? One of the most plausible explanations is the pressure on the investor side. Since its inception, Tumblr has received 125 million of billions of dollars in funding, including the 85 million dollars it had just received last year.

From the point of view of company operation, Tumblr this kind of company's operating costs are not outrageous, the company is still less than 100 people, with such a lot of money in the case, the most reasonable strategy should be focused on the ability to enhance the company's core competitiveness of things-to consolidate the quality of the site's content and the cultural atmosphere has been formed.

But for investors, Tumblr's profit model is very unclear. For Karp, if the financing has to gamble, then find the direction of profit is the most critical. And for investors, from blogs to micro-blogging to light blog, there is no profit model, if Tumblr existing situation is not developed, may have to repeat the mistakes of the blog. This is probably the reason why Tumblr is eager to try advertising mode.

Good things need capital to support, capital can promote a good thing better, but to build on the basis of interest. Companies like Skype and Flickr, for example, have to sell to big companies because they don't have an effective profit model.

Look around the world, we like all kinds of good things, in fact, the unconscious has been driven by capital, has been the result of commercial integration, even if David Karp so fresh and ideal entrepreneurs, after all, it is difficult to resist this trend, business is so domineering, business is so helpless ah.