Tumblr has just announced another healthy influx of cash — $5 million from Spark and Union Square Ventures — nearly doubling the $5.2 million raised in A and B rounds of financing. The popular mini-blog company has been testing and optimizing various paid features for a while and hopes 2010 will bring it further down the road to profitability.
Tumblr is trying to avoid the typical freemium route by offering a smörgåsbord of endemic paid features. Just last month, it put the finishing touches on a payment processing interface for these new features, including premium themes at a range of price points.
Founder and tech wunderkind David Karp wrote to us this morning, “After looking over our roadmap, John, our team, and I all felt that staying on our current track – experimenting with new paid features and optimizing the ones with early traction – was the best way we could spend 2010.”
Karp revealed the company has “a dozen more paid features in the pipeline” as well as a host of new, free features; we hope to provide more details on those soon. The paid features will be focused on promoting high-quality content, increasing pageviews and helping content creators profit from their blogging.
And speaking of pageviews, here are some stats for you to chew on. The 3-year-old content management system has 4.5 million users who upload an average of 29 posts per second. Over the past 30 days, Tumblr garnered a collective total of 1.1 billion pageviews.
What do you think of Tumblr’s interesting, hybrid-freemium revenue plan? Would you pay for à la carte premium features for a Tumblr blog?
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Tags: fundraising, startups, tumblr, vc
