I've included links to a few relevant Quora threads here:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-is-Posterous-business-model</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Posterous/How-does-Posterous-make-money</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-than-premium-themes" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-exactly-will-Tumblr-monetize-Other-...</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-generate-revenue</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e-g-Blogger-Tumblr-WordPress-make-money" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-do-free-blog-publishing-platforms-e...</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blogging-platform-provider-(e.g.-Tumblr-Posterous-etc.)" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-monetize-blogging-as-the-blo...</a><p>There is surprisingly little detail here, though, possibly suggesting that the companies haven't quite figured it out yet!
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.<p>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.
I don't think Tumblr are making money at the moment. I mean, they might sell themes but that's hardly going to come close to their outgoings.<p>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.
If they could fetch $1 cpm and sell their entire inventory they could pull $1M/day.<p>Correction: $1M every four days <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/tumblr-pageviews-a-day/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/tumblr-pageviews-a-day/</a>
According to Techsmart Posterious a Funding:$5.14M!
There has to be some brains behind it somewhere.<p><a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/posterous" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/posterous</a>
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 <i>are</i> 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.
Posterous: Add affiliate links, special marketing deals with brands<p>Tumblr: Premium themes, featured directory listings, "digital stickers"<p>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.
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.