I hope Automattic doesn’t add paid plans to Tumblr. Ads are bad but there’s something about the spirit of Tumblr, as an aspect of web culture, that doesn’t fit into the enterprise spirit of paywalls. It’s bad enough that it became SFW-only.
@sku\_b Agreed. They could definitely improve the ads, which makes me think even less of the idea of paid plans; they could be the benevolent hosts of a massive social network that, even with the censoring, could still provide a place for people whose posts run afoul of the bland sameness elsewhere. They can be that which Tumblr was best at, a home for creativity along a broad spectrum and not so tightly defined by the technical underpinnings of the host itself.
@simonwoods I disagree. I don't think a paywall that hides content behind $ to Tumblr makes sense, but I do think that paid subscriptions for bloggers that add new functionality, especially if it's platform functionality that let's them make money off of their posting, is a great fit.
@jsonbecker Tumblr already has a comprehensive set of features. Whilst I don't disagree more could not be added, my fear comes from the possibility of Automattic starting to wreck the free version by moving features behind the paywall.
Keep in mind that they force annual payments for fairly basic features with WordPress Hosted. This might work in enterprise culture but does not fit a massive, mainstream network that is in fact mostly built around being different.
@simonwoods as long as they don’t put use your own domain, I think there’s plenty of room. Analytics, membership, long video uploads, scheduled posting with long queues all come to mind.
@simonwoods I don’t know. But I thought a tumblr template for the site to look like tumblr. A plug-in for the posting interface and probably something like jet pack for the social media side of it
@simonwoods @jsonbecker WordPress.com is so bizarre; last I checked (but maybe Blot and Micro.blog have driven them to lower prices? :-P ), the prices for what I’d consider basic features (like using your domain name) are exorbitant, and the ads on the free sites are absolute bottom-of-the-barrel (and hard to distinguish from content on mobile…”Is this another of X’s photos? Oh, no, it’s a crappy ad smashed right below X’s content“). (That said, yearly billing has always been the norm for web hosting; maybe that’s changing with the subscription tidal wave, but non-annual billing for hosting always used to be hard to find.)
However, one of the upgrades/add-ons Matt Mullenweg has mentioned in the series of posts/interviews is some sort of commerce integration, which makes a lot of sense for the artist community on tumblr…have your commissions/print sales/whatever “shop” handled by the same people hosting your blog/site, vs having to trust Patreon’s VCs idea of the correct business model, etc.