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Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says (techcrunch.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 63 points 3 years ago (5 children)

What I want to know about these "unprofitable" tech companies is where all the money is going? Wikipedia, which is run entirely on donations, has an operating budget of ~$150 million. Reddit, Twitter, etc... make many times this amount and even with the greater number of employees and salaries it still sounds like some creative Hollywood accounting that they're unprofitable. It feels like a big chunk of money is just going to investors/C-classes so they can just say they're not actually making any money while the big players get their payday.

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  • [–] 56 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That was my reaction when I heard Spez whine about reddit not being profitable.

    How much money did you waste on bullshit? If you'd just focused on running the damn platform I instead of reinventing it into the monstrosity it is now, how much better might you be doing?

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That valuable and incredibly useful NFT tech ain't gonna develop itself! /s

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Trend chasing like this always shows me what CEOs are just morons with no vision

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's a bit like the whole "infrastructure ain't sexy" argument. As the chief executive administrator, you're paid to "strategize", when sometimes, you just need to keep the engines running and the bills paid, but in today's society that's not praised. You need to capture people and investors' ADHD-span, make megalomanous plans that can't possibly ever come true or be some guy who fires everyone to attempt to grow profit margins.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    What this number suggests to me is that Tumblr has revenue less than 20 million dollars. I figure:

    • about 100 employees
    • based in new York
    • average $100,000 salary
    • 10m annually in humans
    • 2-3m annually for office expenses
    • 20-30m annually for hosting

    Some of these numbers can be up or down, but when I worked at a similar company in New York, we had operating expenses in the same range. (Coincidentally, we had revenue on the same range, and got sold off in a fire sale)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    $100k avg salary for a New York tech company? The lowest level employees there almost certainly make well above that. If we're talking avg salary it's probably at least $200k.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    Really good point, and great reminder that I don't appreciate Wikipedia enough. They've been doing the same thing for 20+ years with no ads and only the occasional ask for money. And I think they know better than to try and make money or go public when all of their content is user-generated.

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