They are making money but probably not much. David once said they would probably make millions if they put a single AdSense banner in the Dashboard, but they refuse to use regular advertising and want to make a more creative way of making money.
With how terrible the Tumblr service has been the past year (I finally had to move every site I had off of it) I often wonder if they are making money. I had read somewhere they make pretty good on the themes and "feature" piece, but not sure how that could amount to very much.
This is a nice comment from one of your links:
Luis Felipe Lanz, Intrapreneur, software architect, tec...
In my humble opinion, Posterous seems to be following the same strategy than Foursquare, Twitter or even Quora, start for free until get a consolided installed base users, then start side business around publicity.
Three or four strong companies emerging from the carnage of thousands and thousands of others doesn't sound like any more now fun than it was the first time.
I don't know why they won't use nice looking ads from sites like Carbon or The Deck, which IMO add value rather than take away.
I just read that Tumblr has passed WordPress in terms of # of installed blogs, but I believe Matt's company makes tons more cash. Very interesting too, considering WP is OS.
Wordpress has also enabled lots of developers to make tons of money through templates and plugins. For example, woothemes makes millions/year selling wordpress templates.
Posterous: Add affiliate links, special marketing deals with brands
Tumblr: Premium themes, featured directory listings, "digital stickers"
They could probably earn a lot more if they started with ads or premium accounts. Right now it looks like they're focused on acquiring users, the focus on profits will likely come later.
Two of Tumblr's three sources of revenue (featured directory listings and digital stickers to put on directory listings) are no longer after they ditched the old directory system a few months ago in favor of a curated one.
For Posterous, custom domains are $13 (or maybe $25, the custom domain signup page is a little confusing) if you register through them. There's a fair amount of markup there.
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Yes, megavideo, I am looking at your 72-minutes limit.
About those without ads, probably their business model is to trying to get you to subscribe, by being less annoying than those without ads.
I guess they're working on the revenue generating bit, as seems to be the case for so many funded tech companies over the last few years.
(Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/22/founder-stories-karp-tumblr...)
http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model
http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money
http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money
http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-...
http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue
http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e...
http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blo...
There is surprisingly little detail here, though, possibly suggesting that the companies haven't quite figured it out yet!
In my humble opinion, Posterous seems to be following the same strategy than Foursquare, Twitter or even Quora, start for free until get a consolided installed base users, then start side business around publicity.
In fact, they were very resistant to the idea of have any advertisements and were adamant in maintaining clean search results.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/posterous
I just read that Tumblr has passed WordPress in terms of # of installed blogs, but I believe Matt's company makes tons more cash. Very interesting too, considering WP is OS.
Correction: $1M every four days http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/tumblr-pageviews-a-day/
Tumblr: Premium themes, featured directory listings, "digital stickers"
They could probably earn a lot more if they started with ads or premium accounts. Right now it looks like they're focused on acquiring users, the focus on profits will likely come later.