Tumblr has always been one of my favorite microblogging services. They’ve got a unique culture, and from the very beginning have been very useful for a wide number of applications. Most people either tend to use it as a linkblogging service or as a sort of Internet scratchpad to copy and paste cool videos, quotes, chat logs and such, but my earliest use was as a shownotes system for my daily podcast.
The ability to automatically post articles from an RSS list allowed me to hook a tag from Google Reader into my tumblog, and then simply refer to a subdomain in my podcast to find the shownotes for that particular episode.
As more and more folks get into using Tumblr for their unique purposes, CEO David Karp explains how they’ll plan on making money over the next indeterminate amount of time.
The idea is, not surprisingly, a freemium model. You can tell by his responses that the Mullenweg method plays pretty highly in his expectations for the service, but before that they plan on rolling out future features and asking the users to pay between $5 a month to $10 a year.
Will it work? If it were any other platform, I’d probably say no. Tumblr users are a special breed, and particularly dedicated to the content management system (in a way, like WordPress users are).
It should be interesting to watch unfold.
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