Tumblr and the End of the Eyeballs-Are-Everything Era - WSJ
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/tumblr-and-the-end-of-the-eyeballs-are-everything-era-11566014411
Its impenetrability was a challenge to advertisers. On top of that, many of its users interspersed their posts on various fandoms, obsessions and memes with sexual content. “A lot of advertising clients, particularly in the U.S., get disproportionately nervous about being seen next to someone’s boobs,” says Dr. Tiidenberg.
Advertisers instead turned increasingly to the ostensibly safer realms of Google and Facebook. Together, the two giants now suck up 57% of all digital ad spend (...)
The same thing happened in media, of course—such as the “newspaper” you’re reading now—and the response was a massive shift away from display advertising and toward subscription revenue.
But actually charging people to access its services was never really an option for Tumblr, built as it was primarily on the hopes, dreams and countless blog posts of teens all over the world.