[newjersey]

As much as we like to say bad things about Marissa Mayer (I don't know her in person so she might be truly awful in person I don't know) but she might have made the right call in buying Tumblr. I think Tumblr still has value. When the teens who use tumblr today become older, there might even be some emotional/sentimental value in Tumblr for them.

[minimaxir]

Traffic at Tumblr's age means nothing if you can't monetize it.

Yahoo included it in a $4.5B markdown on it a couple months ago. http://qz.com/608497/yahoo-just-admitted-it-badly-overpaid-f...

> The value of Tumblr’s tangible and intangible assets amounted to just $353 million, according to Yahoo’s accounting. Tumblr also had $114 million in liabilities.

[alaskamiller]

Tumblr got to where Twitter wanted to be before Twitter did. By the Twitter figured it out they've been on the decline since. But Tumblr is a really bad buy.

Tumblr has three phases, the gen Y (25-35 yo) has already cycled out and the gen Z (15-25 yo) are on it because it's not Twitter and not Facebook. It will decline just like Myspace boomed then declined.

Drop Instagram and WhatsApp in there and they're the best buys.

What's more interesting is how Reddit came to be the new Craigslist for both gen Y and gen Z.

Oh, try putting in Snapchat. Since Snapchat only has dark content they're not shown to be any bigger than Reddit although I peg them at maybe half the growth rate of Instagram.

Wait it out another two product cycles and they'll sharing clear content, then maybe we can finally see if the Facebook vs Snapchat duel is really real.

[askafriend]

I think you have a very fundamental misunderstanding about each of these networks and how they're used.

Your conclusions don't match with how people use these products and I say this as an avid user of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit.

For example, to describe Reddit as the new Craigslist is completely off base. Reddit is the new Vbulletin forum software. Reddit is where vast and varying communities form around different topics and they all happen to have the same format but that's all that they share in common.

[partiallypro]

I don't think you're right about Twitter. Twitter is a real time information company, more or less. No journalists or news savvy people to to Tumblr for content. There is value in having live content coming from "content creators" than in cases like Tumblr where most of the content is not original at all. Twitter doesn't know it's own value because it's poorly run, but I don't think they ever wanted to be like Tumblr.

[newjersey]

I think they want to be more appealing to casuals and are willing to sacrifice their core users at the altar of a timeline that is not a simple reverse chronological but tries to guess what you likely like reading.

[s_kilk]

> When the teens who use tumblr today become older, there might even be some emotional/sentimental value in Tumblr for them.

Would it not be in danger of becoming something like LiveJournal? Where the users are an ever narrower segment of a slightly older demographic group, with no growth.