Would it be possible for Tumblr to share more financial information? I'm specifically curious about how much revenue is coming from users (Ad-Free Browsing, Blaze, Important Blue Internet Checkmarks, Dashboard Crabs, merchandise, et cetera) as compared to revenue from advertisements, and also how that stacks up against the costs of running Tumblr (servers, hosting, payroll, et cetera). I personally would feel better about financially supporting Tumblr if I had more information about where and how far the money goes, and I suspect I'm not the only person for whom that is true. I want Tumblr to keep existing as the weird and wonderful website it is, so encouraging more user support seems like a good thing.
I can't share specifics, but I can tell you that it costs many millions more to run Tumblr than we currently bring in via avenues that aren't advertising (advertising + non-ad revenue also doesn't close the gap, but advertising makes a significant amount more in revenue than all our non-ad revenue). You're going to see us experiment a lot this year with different non-ad revenue ideas, because we would like to get to a state where we are sustainable (obviously, that is our most imperative goal) but also where we can turn off programmatic advertising entirely (programmatic ads are the ones like from Amazon or "this one weird trick"; we want to expand our partnership relationships, which are things like our Stranger Things campaign last June, Manscaped, etc). Not everything we try will resonate, but we are going to try plenty of things, because we simply have to. We have a tricky balance right now that I find very interesting - make things our long-time users will find engaging, while also making sense to the next 5 million users who aren't yet on Tumblr. There are tons of different communities on Tumblr, and we want to be able to provide this space for all of them, and so future fans and folks exploring their identity and the world have a safe space to do so.
To answer your question as directly as I can, the money that users pay to us, and what we make from advertising, goes directly to the costs of Tumblr (including salaries and server costs, but not limited to that), but it costs Automattic a lot more than we bring in to cover the gap (again to the tune of 10s of millions). Automattic can't do that forever. We have decreased our costs by quite a bit, which helps, but the most significant gains will come directly from users. We have made big improvements in the last year, and if we can keep building on that, we have bright prospects. Blaze and Important Blue Internet Checkmark are doing the best, and we have high hopes for Live and merch, both of which we will keep tweaking.
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