Third Financing Round for Tumblr raises $5 million more

In its third financing round, Tumblr managed to raise $5 million more from its current Venture Funders, Union Venture and Spark Capital.  Tumblr’s current funding is now around $10 million, and the microblogging platform is beginning to look for ways to start generating income after 3 years of growing both in users and impressions.

Now it seems about time for Tumblr to begin with some methods to generate income, and according to founder David Karp.  The company has started rolling out a series of paid services.

Basically after dropping the idea of a “Tumblr Plus” which would have been a premium Tumblr service with advanced features not available to free users (these new features are now available to everyone, for instance static pages).

The first of these paid services seem to be the premium themes, both created by Tumblr itself or the users (in this last case they take a %30 cut from the purchase and they go from from $9 to $49 each one).  Other income generating options include buying stickers and spots on a directory of recommended blogs.  Another potential revenue stream could be a feature that lets users order prints of images they see on tumblelogs, there has been a small experiment on this.

You can take a look at what one of  Tumblr’s investors has to say about this.

The graphic you can see below shows clearly how astonishing Tumblr’s traffic growth has been since its birth.  As with many other web 2.0 services it hast yet to be known if it can actually make money.

Source: MediaMemo.