Tumblr Is in the Red and Losing $30 Million Every Year

Once the go-to spot for teens wearing Doc Martens and suffering from a taste in alternative music, Tumblr is apparently seriously in the red: The platform’s CEO claims that the company is losing $30 million annually.

TechCrunch reported that CEO Matt Mullenweg spilled the beans during the Q&A, which was cohosted by COO Zandy Ring and attended by a meager 800 users, despite being plastered across every Tumblr account’s dashboard. According to Mullenweg, the platform is spending $30 million more than it’s making as it tries to desperately cling to relevance in its fight against Instagram and TikTok. Moreover, COO Ring explained that the platform is not seeing much of an increase in its userbase.

“People have this impression that we have massive growth right now, and we really don’t,” Ring said during the Q&A.

Earlier this week, Tumblr Staff, an account run by employees, posted a lengthy message describing the ways the social network, once worth $1 billion, hopes to fix core issues in order to appeal to new users. Tumblr Staff says point-blank in the message that “the underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use” (emphasis theirs) due to the fact that users struggle to curate their own feeds. The plan is a six-pronged approach that features vague dedications to providing users with high-quality content and growing the platform’s user base.

Tumblr truly was the go-to place for teens and young adults in the early 2010s. The Tumblr aesthetic—a distinctly 2014 look—made a brief resurgence in 2020. However, in 2018, Tumblr opted to remove pre-existing and future content that it deemed explicit. The platform’s decision to remove NSFW media was a bumpy ride, with its removal bot flagging images of dogs and kids instead of naked bodies while further stigmatizing the online sex work industry. Tumblr’s caused users to flee from the platform, with reporting by Mashable claiming that Tumblr saw a nearly 30% decline in its user base. Tumblr eventually halfway walked back on the decision and, last fall, announced that the website would host nudity but no explicit sex. Tt appears the damage was done regardless.