http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/theres-no-money-in-internet-culture.html
This New York Magazine article is so full of incisive analysis that it was very difficult to pick a “meaty goodness to quote” paragraph, so I urge you to GO READ IT FOR YOURSELF.
From the article:
Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life. For much of its life, Facebook aggressively trafficked not in collecting rage comics and funny video clips, but in collecting bland lists of favorite movies and where you went to college — personal information that it can use to target ads with alarming specificity. And by selling ads against people’s identities, rather than their creative content, the company has churned out impressive profits, and given a wider impression that an ad-supported content platform is viable. (One of the great ironies of Twitter’s and Tumblr’s inability to make sustained profits is that Instagram and Facebook are both full of videos and posts screenshotted and stolen from their more productive, less wealthy rival platforms.)
(And people wonder why I got the hell off of Facebook when I saw just what a J.-Edgar-Hoover wet dream that site is for data mining and social network mapping.)
Tumblr’s Unclear Future Shows That There’s No Money in Internet Culture
Tumblr Exodus 