“…we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team” continuing to say that this is a “…team that regularly spends their nights and weekends working feverishly to provide the best service we can against extraordinary challenges”. He signed off saying that “Plenty of services will import Tumblr blogs. Please go away.”Well, there is a fine way to grow your business. Every company with frequent technical problems should tell their customers to either stop whining or go over to a competitor since things are probably done better over there anyway. The internet business is not what it used to be, no?
In Tildesley ’s defense, Tumblr is overpopulated by whiny hipsters, emotionally troubled agoraphobics, sexual perverts, and other such damaged individuals. The sheer amount of whining he must face on a daily basis as a result of their excessive use on the site’s limited servers must be incredibly annoying.
I am only half kidding. Tumblr is growing at a rate of 250 million impressions per week. That iis a lot of eye balls for potential advertisers. Tumblr is fast becoming a place where brands connect with consumers. What that is not is the place for anti-corporate emos to take up valuable server space and tech time. On a site in which the vast majority of users pay no fees to use it, who can blame the guy?
Here is the problem--aside from the arguable point that the free users make up most of those 250 million and growing impressions--Tildesley’s snappish tone reveals a friction within Tumblr. The company has a new influx of $ 40 million in cash that ought to be used to expand servers, fix queuing issues, back up applications, and a myriad other problems that have popped up over the last few months. But that is not where the money is going.
Tumblr recently paid twenty fashion bloggers to go to New York to cover fashion week. Is that the wisest way to spend revenue on a site with so many issues? It only is if Tumblr is seeking to become the next cultural hub like MySpace used to be. Tumblr is strolling down that path, no doubt. Consider where MySpace was just a few years ago versus its likely shutting down this June due to revenue fall offs.
What happened to MySpace? Users found greener pastures with Facebook. Tumblr already face stiff competition from WordPress and Posterus. The flippant attitude of Tumblr management current users unhappy with Tumblr ought to go over to them is not going to help. A number of users already migrated after Tumlr went down for a day in December, albeit not en masse. So that is poor tech, bad customer service, unwise spending decisions, and alienation of users. It looks like Tumblr will go the way of MySpace sooner rather than later.
Full disclosure; I have a Tumblr. It is linked in the Stalk Me Not section of the right hand column. I signed up in September 2009 in order to have a place to dump photos I had planned to attach to a blog entry at The Eye, but never found a post for. My interest in Tumblr has gone up and down depending on who I have been following--usually reciprocals. Maybe many users spend more time on the site than I do, but I have rarely experienced any glitches. Nevertheless, I say a big “meh” to the possibility of its death.
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