My concern is that it reminds me of what Google did with the blogosphere–it was wide open with a huge diversity of stuff that people were creating in the blogosphere. They’ve built a brilliant, but single model for some creators. Compare that to a YouTube and their partner program. He then spoke about Tumblr’s view on monetization for its creators, making some contentious (although brave) comments, this time against Google and YouTube’s model.
It seems that Karp has killed the first product to help readers curate the massive Tumblr ecosystem (as of today, the platform has 90 million posts created/day by 100 millions bloggers, totaling at 45 billion posts), but this doesn’t mean it’s Tumblr’s last attempt. In a bit of a contrast to Karp, Aria Haghighi, CEO of Prismatic, and Zite CEO Mark Johnson sang the praises of personalization in content consumption, and how their services are helping users and readers curate and expand the content they are recommended. Like many creative ambitions, this didn’t work the way we wanted.” Storyboard was our take on the Tumblr beat. My hope was that we were going to surface the incredible stuff that’s going on on Tumblr, stuff you had no idea existed. When pushed further on why exactly it wasn’t the right tool, he said frankly, “It wasn’t working in the ways we had intended for it to work. It wasn’t the right tool in our toolbox.” We hired a team of journalists as an experimental marketing initiative to report on our community.
Speaking at GigaOm’s paidContent Live conference in New York City, Karp said the following regarding the Storyboard team: “It’s not a knock on that team. Today was the first time he has been able to speak freely and publicly. There was clear backlash in the media world, including a certain piece satirizing Karp’s post.