It was sold to Automattic by Verizon for only $3 million.. Deal of the century.

How would you convert the $3m Tumblr investment into a profit? Just ads?

At this point the brand has been trashed and tarnished.

There's a lot of love for the Tumblr brand out there and people love a redemption story.

No doubt, but my question remains: How would you help Tumblr lives it's best and most profitable life, to recoup the investment cost?

Roll back the restrictions & add some light advertising & premium junk like reddit's. They bought it for 3 million, they don't have to turn it into a giant for it to be a happy profitable business.

It still gets a huge amount of traffic.

It's not really a mystery how to make that work: Ads, premium memberships.

No need to be particularly innovative on that front. Maybe do the NFT Avatar thing that Reddit is killing it with.

Tumblr trying to get their users into NFT avatars would be possibly the single funniest hellstorm the internet has seen in ages.

It's interesting.

It's worked really well at Reddit where the attitude towards NFTs (or at least crypto) is similarly cynical.

They could pass a hat around at the yearly company meetup to cover $3m. I don't think paying for it was a big consideration when they bought it.