People have been so preoccupied with the idea of Twitter going down as Meta's Threads was launched, that they have overlooked other social media companies that may be struggling to stay afloat. One of those is Tumblr, which has admitted to losing millions every year.
Tumblr is Not Doing Good
Tumblr's user traffic now pales compared to its hay day. A lot of new apps and platforms have emerged since, and like older social media sites, people started to forget about Tumblr. As you know, this does not bode well for any company.
The social media site's lack of popularity against newer apps has taken a toll, so much so that it loses around $30 million every year. This was revealed by the company's CEO, Matt Mullenweg during his live Q&A, which was only attended by 800 users, according to Gizmodo.
The Q&A event, which was cohosted by Tumblr COO Zandy Ring, was somewhat of a failure, considering how much notice about the event appeared on the site. Other than the lack of increase in user base, its competitors are also, well, competitive.
Ring expressed people believe that Tumblr has massive growth when in truth, they did not. It was once a hub for teenagers and young adults back in the 2010s, wherein "aesthetic" photos originated from. It has seen a further decline since.
It may have something to do with the fact that Tumblr tried to remove explicit media, which they failed to do given that the measures mislabeled photos and took down the wrong content. This resulted in the platform losing 30% of its users.
Tumblr Fights for Relevance
Although Tumblr has been losing value, the company is still looking for ways to bring it back to its former glory. In fact, there are new strategies the social media site has devised to do that. For starters, they admitted that Tumblr was not easy to use.
They established guiding principles to follow in order to achieve their goal of increasing their user base by drawing in more signups. They will first improve their search engine optimization strategies to be able to reach more users when they're looking for certain content.
Tumblr will also allow access to its content without the need to log in or sign up. Through that, people will be able to see what the platform can offer, which could be the way to convince them to stay a while longer by signing up.
The company will also prioritize high-quality content so that users will see them first when they open the site or the app. The goal in this aspect is for users to not encounter any "confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks" when they want to look for more content.
Part of the plan is cleaning up the replies and reblogs section as well. Users will be able to collapse reblog threads to make the section less messy while exploring other replies. Based on the guidelines, Tumblr has a lot to work on, but it might just be enough to get it back on track.
