An Open Letter to Marissa Mayer of Yahoo
Dear Marissa Mayer,
I have been an unpaid volunteer for Yahoo for the last three years. Devoted almost every waking moment to your company. Wrote over 15,000 blog posts and built up over 270,000 followers for my Tumblr blogs devoted to crafts and DIY. You paid $1 billion to acquire people like me. Yet today your company saw fit to terminate my 4 Tumblr blogs (2 were Tumblr Spotlight Blogs), without any notice or reason given. Is this how you treat your valued employees? I would hope not. So why are you treating me this way?
I have no idea why my blogs have suddenly vanished from Tumblr – I received no email notice, no warning, no nothing. I write about crafts and DIY. I am careful about sources, and always credit the original source. EPBOT (a major blog) once titled me “the most ethical blogger on Tumblr”. I am a conscientious curator – I only show excerpts of tutorials and always link to the original source. I explicitly state on my website that I will take down any content if contacted, if I have used it without obtaining proper permission – but I have contacted hundreds of bloggers asking for permission to post their DIYs. I pay attention to copyright notices and I read bloggers’ fair use policies. Most bloggers are thrilled to see their posts featured in my blogs and contact me directly about being featured on my site; I can send thousands of page views to their sites. I have seen dozens of small blogs I have featured on my blog get noticed, seen by others like MAKE, and grow their blogs enormously.
I have worked as an unpaid editor for Tumblr too, picking featured items for your DIY and Crafts categories. I stopped being an editor when I saw other editors’ featuring DIYs from spam and scrape sites or DIYs where the tutorial was posted in full without the blogger’s consent.
Today I am puzzled why Yahoo would terminate my blogs and eliminate my accounts without even a word. No contact, no email, no notice, no warning. My largest blog, truebluemeandyou.tumblr.com, had 142,754 followers this week. My children’s crafts blog, unicornhatparty.com (hosted by tumblr) had 71,046 followers. My Christmas and Halloween crafts blogs had 25,562 and 31,143 followers as of yesterday via cached images of my blogs.
Fortunately I have exported most of my blog postings to a wordpress site as a back up. But I am still missing over 3,000 posts. I have lost contact with my community of followers. And I still have no idea why. I’m not a porn site. I’m not spamming anyone. I am more attentive to copyright than almost anyone on Tumblr and have been unfollowed because of my “copyright rants”. If you are going to shut me down, you might as well shut down your billion dollar baby, as the whole premise of Tumblr is reblogging – which normally happens without attribution or permission. Surely this cannot be your idea of a successful business model – pissing off your most productive and loyal content providers?
What’s more, I feel like you have impugned my reputation to 270,000 followers and the craft blogging community. Surely they must be wondering “what did True Blue do to “deserve” having her website terminated? Surely she must have done something really wrong”. And I have no way to defend myself, because my access to the community has been cut off.
I look forward to receiving answers from your customer service team – because 10 hours later I still haven’t heard a word.
In the meantime, I would suggest to everyone that they be diligent in backing up posts to Tumblr, because they could vanish tomorrow, and you could lose three years of work, like me, in the flash of an eye, without explanation, recourse, or reason. If you think Tumblr doesn’t sound like a sensible host for a blogging site, based on my experience I’d be hard pressed to argue with you. And if you want to find me or see what 270,000 people thought was worth following in the crafts and DIY world – the best tutorials for stuff you’d actually want to make – I’d suggest trying my wordpress backup sites:
Truebluemeandyou.com DIYChristmasCrafts.com DIYHalloweenCrafts.com