SHARE TO SAVE TUMBLR!
– Let’s try and get 100k notes
A review by one of the folks sums it up perfectly:
“What worries me about Yahoo! buying Tumblr is how it would choose to incorporate the website into its email and homepage features. One of the reasons why Tumblr is so unique is because it’s a niche market. By adding more users who don’t fit into this niche, it would make it more difficult for communities to develop within Tumblr, and Tumblr would have to change to accommodate these new users. Tumblr as a website is not the kind that you can sign up for in a day and be on your way. It is a website crafted so that you can immediately post but must spend several weeks, sometimes even months, to build a community. With new users who would not be willing to spend time growing a community, Tumblr would have to be changed, which would alienate its current users. Those users have spent time and effort to make Tumblr what it is today, and they are the ones who spend time on the website daily. A user who is checking onto Tumblr because it’s attached to their homepage is not going to be as strong of a user nor as dedicated. By changing the website to suit this new user, you would lose the strong users while building an undedicated usership.
To any website that would think of buying Tumblr, they must understand that it is a website that cannot be changed to make it more user friendly to a casual blogger. I think that many Tumblr users would be less worried about a buy-out if they were promised that their communities and ways of using Tumblr would not be changed. No one is going to mind Yahoo! buying the website and gaining a few extra million dollars per year from the minimal advertising; what we will be upset with is if a company like Yahoo! then changes the website to increase casual users and decrease dedicated users. Yahoo! would gain nothing by losing this “cool” group of bloggers in an age group they so desperately want to reach, so they must cater to these individuals by leaving the website exactly as is.” – houseoftombombadil
As much as is does sound like a load of bullshit for someone to buy Tumblr, it’s a possibility. I Personally think it should stay independent and I hope David Karp keeps a hold of it like his own child. Or we make enough noise to where such major changes (if bought) will not happen. I would hate to see Tumblr turned into an advertising dump.We’re not a ‘hip fad group’ to be marketed to. I hate the fact that’s all we look like to businesses in the end.