All will be subscriptions in due course. Even Tumblr, a 14-year-old blogging platform, has also begun to adopt this trend. They’ve just announced Post+, a new feature that allows creators to monetize their content by charging their audience a subscription fee.
Regardless of the type of content, whether it’s text, images, GIFs, videos, or audio, whether it’s pranking or severe, it can all be published as content specifically for subscribers. Creators are free to choose between three available subscription rate options: $4, $6, or $10 per month. Tumblr will take 5% of each creator’s total profits.
Post+ is Tumblr’s answer to the growing trend of paid newsletters. That 5% figure is undoubtedly no coincidence, as we know that Substack — one of the most popular newsletter platforms — makes up 10% of its creator community.
Elsewhere, there’s also Bulletin. Facebook’s paid newsletter platform, which is committed to not profiting at all from creators during the initial period of its launch.
Tumblr doesn’t limit who can take advantage of Post+. In other words, creators don’t need to have a certain number of followers to offer paid content. Even so, since Post+ status is still beta, so far, Tumblr still limits it to a select number of creators only.
Tumblr is not as popular as it used to be. However, every day there are still more than 11 million new posts circulating on the Tumblr platform. The number of active users is currently unknown, but the number of blogs is recorded as more than 500 million blogs. This number certainly can’t be the benchmark because we don’t know how many of those 500 million blogs are already off and never release new content.
Interestingly, Tumblr says that 48% of all its users are Gen Z. Gen Z users who spend 26% longer on Tumblr than older users, and their average daily usage time is up more than 100% year-over-year. This could be one of the factors that prompted Tumblr to present Post+ because Gen Z people are already very familiar with subscription culture.