Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money?

Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by unohoo on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @02:03PM (#1633618)

Platforms like posterous and tumblr rely heavily on scale - ie, a large number of users. So, their first priority is to get as much users on board as possible from other publishing platforms. Once they reach a certain threshold, they can start experimenting with revenue generation - be it in form of advertising or premium hosting etc.

Thats similar to the way Wordpress played out.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by retube on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @06:28PM (#1634373)

Sure. But how the hell do they convince investors to get on board? Any future numbers are so pie-in-the-sky, and revenues so far off, why would anyone touch it?

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by unohoo on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @09:34PM (#1634771)

Unfortunately, I'm not a VC so cant offer a response that'd do justice to your question. Most of the VC investments happen based on the team and little based on the idea (at least thats what I've read everywhere) - so I guess the founders impressed the investors enough to invest.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by nl on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @10:15PM (#1634858)

It's not pie-in-the-sky.

Anyone should be able to make between $4 & $5 per 1000 visitors from just running AdSense.

Use that as a baseline and do the math from there. If you can add-on non-advertising forms of revenue then that is a bonus.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by rphlx on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @11:21PM (#1634962)

Maybe $4 per year. GOOG keeps reducing AdSense payments to help provide quarter-over-quarter income growth.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by nl on Thursday August 26, 2010 @12:13AM (#1635048)

Got math?

It's going to depend on your field of course, but it's pretty easy to get between 0.5 & 1% clickthough and 10c per clicks. That's between 50c & $1 per 1000 pageviews, and I said $5 per 1000 visitors (ie, uniques). If you double the CTR (quite doable with optimization) and get 2 pageviews per visitor then that's $4/visitor already...

If you prefer, look at it like this. The lowest Adsense eCPM I've seen over any medium period by anyone I know is $0.70.

Posterous is doing around 1.5 million pageviews per day (http://www.quantcast.com/search.jsp?domain=posterous.com) and Tumblr is doing over 60 million.

Getting revenue with that much traffic wouldn't be too hard.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by rphlx on Friday August 27, 2010 @01:06AM (#1638056)

I was being snarky, but, AdSense payouts are trending endlessly downward as far as I can tell, and that scares investors. At least it should.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by retube on Friday August 27, 2010 @08:31AM (#1638597)

OK sure. but how do you estimate your visitor/traffic growth?

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by nl on Friday August 27, 2010 @09:02AM (#1638673)

Both sites have release traffic numbers in the past.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by antidaily on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @02:54PM (#1633759)

I noticed that Wordpress.com sites started serving ads too.

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Re:Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money? by jamesgeck0 on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @09:53PM (#1634818)

If I remember correctly, they've been serving ads occasionally since close to the beginning of the site. It was just a reasonably infrequent occurrence.

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