Tumblr raises 4.5M for micro blogging platform
By Azam on December 12, 2008 
Tumblr the micro blogging platform raises $4.5 M form investors lead by Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Traffic on Tumblr has grown 6x in the past year and now reaches over 15 million monthly uniques through more than 500,000 publishers and 61 million page views a month. Tumblr plans include the launch of a premium service that represents the company’s first revenue generation. It will be followed by a revenue strategy that leverages both Tumblr’s publishing platform and community, while continuing the company’s focus on innovation and invention.
Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that allows users to quickly and easily upload nice and clean looking posts with little effort. Tumblr fills the gap between twitter mico texting and wordpress full fledge blog posting . Tumblr currently has no revenue stream and plans to add premium services for revenue generation.
David Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with features like extra storage and additional premium services.
Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”
Union Square and Spark also led Tumblr’s Series A round of $775,000 financing that was joined by Betaworks and individual investors including Vimeo Founder Jakob Lodwick; Albert Wenger, Former President of Delicious; and Martin Varsavsky, BioTech entrepreneur.
Reading List
WSJ All Things D Who Said Web 2.0 Was R.I.P.? Tumblr Raises $4.5M
TechCrunch Tumblr Pulls In $4.5M In Funding, Puts Out Premium Services
VentureBeat Microbloging service Tumblr raises $4.5M more
Tags : Blogger, Flickr, Google, Micro Bloging, Spark Capital, Tumblr, twitter, Union Square Ventures, WordPress, yahoo