[kijin]

Don't think of it as simply gathering URLs, but as a personal information manager that you can (1) keep private if you want to; (2) curate to your heart's desire; (3) put up on the "cloud" without having to worry about the owner selling your data to third parties, because you're a paying customer; and (4) download your entire collection in a widely supported format and move it elsewhere on a moment's notice. I don't see Tumblr supporting these features anytime soon.

If you pay a little more, Pinboard also gives you a snapshot of all the pages you ever bookmarked.

[webwanderings]

You didn't get the irony. The mere idea that you are paying to keep other people' stuff, is silly.

Take the analogy of doing the same in the offline world. You have a house, you have your stuff, some of which you keep inside your house and some in the garage. Would you rent a storage space to keep other people's stuff? You certainly wouldn't keep other people's stuff in your own garage to begin with, even if that stuff is "informational".

You see, there is a reason why Google is not in this business of bookmarking, nor do you see Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo or anyone else. The browsers provide this as a basic service, so you can keep the URLs in history or bookmarks manager. The online world would be a really silly place if people in general would have to pay to keep the website URLs.

[kijin]

Google is not in the bookmarking business because it is not profitable enough for them.

But apparently, Pinboard generates enough profit to make it sustainable without any ads. Which means there are enough people who pay $10 for an experience that they consider superior to their browser's own bookmark manager.

Why would you pay for a tourist/hiking map if you don't own any property that is shown on it? Presumably because you like the convenience of being able to pull it out at any time and study it in its full 40" glory without having to worry about your phone's data roaming rates. Why would you pay for an "enhanced" contact manager app if you don't own any of the phone numbers and email addresses that you manage with it? Presumably because the cost of the app is well justified by its improvements over the stock Contacts app. I don't see any silliness or irony in that. It's just a cost-benefit analysis that turned out to favor paying some guy a small amount of money to facilitate your interaction with third parties.