Creators can now charge a subscription for their blogs.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tumblr-introduces-paid-subscription-tool-to-woo-younger-bloggers-11626872401
Last month, Twitter started to roll out its Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces. Super Follows is a feature that lets creators generate revenue by offering paywalled content to their followers.
YouTube also added new ways for creators to monetize through their channels. Instagram, on the other hand, is embracing eCommerce.
Social media platforms are, indeed, providing new ways for creators to earn and make a living.
And it seems like Tumblr is following suit by launching Post+. It’s the company’s first attempt to let users monetize their content.
What is Tumblr Post+?
Tumblr Post+ is the same as Twitter’s Super Follows. That is creators can choose what content they wish to put behind a subscription. It can be a personal blog post or an original artwork.
The starting price for subscriber-only content is $3.99 per month. Tumblr will get a 5% cut from the profit.
It’s easy to make your content a Post+. After creating a post, you can check a box to indicate that it’s for paying subscribers only. You can choose a video, text post, image, or audio clip to be Post+.
What’s great about it is that unlike Twitter’s Super follows, Post+ isn’t reserved for those with 10k followers. Everyone can create content and get paid with Post+.
Is Tumblr a Thing of the Past?
Tumblr’s popularity might be fading. But it still has millions of page views a month. The social media platform has gone through changes over the years.
It was first acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for a whopping $1.1 billion deal. In 2019, the company that owns wordpress.com, Automaticc, acquired Tumblr.
But the massive change Tumblr experienced was in 2018 when it started to ban all sexually explicit content and pornography. A month before that, the app was removed from the App Store because child pornography passed through its filtering technology.
It was banned for four months.
After the ban, the platform’s page views declined by 151 million. Since then, it’s experiencing a downward trend. Although the company failed to provide a report about its monthly active user numbers, it shared that it has over 11 million posts a day with 500 million blogs.
After Automaticc acquired it, the platform hasn’t fully recovered. Its growth is stagnant.
Under the new ownership, the company is still struggling to find new ways to generate profit that can surely appeal to the younger demographic.
The majority of its users are Gen Z. These users spend 26% more time on Tumblr than older bloggers.
And these users expect to be paid when they post something online. Young fan-fiction writers and digital artists are the most active on the platform.
Automaticc said that when they are looking at the younger generation, they want to know what would appeal to them. And this is why they came up with Post+.
Young creators are already being paid by their fans through other platforms. Last week, Facebook announced that it would pay over $1 billion to its content creators.
Creators are the lifeblood of the Internet. If social media platforms don’t care about them, then they won’t stay relevant for long.
