thebelongingyouseek:

maniacalartistry:

yall its been real but if net neutrality gets booted there is no way in HELL i am ever paying to use tumblr

the ironic thing to me is that yahoo is trying to end net neutrality, yet for some reason they believe they’re privileged enough be exempt from millenials’ total lack of brand loyalty

the core majority of tumblr’s userbase is millenials and people in their 30s who use this website for free or very rarely pay for services. Even tumblr’s so-called ‘celebrities’ who are regularly paying for services are majority 40-and-unders who have historically crafted their brand out of resources that are available under net neutrality and low-cost websites (Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, deviantart, Facebook, etc).

even if yahoo intends to fully alienate unpaying users and create a website that caters exclusively to those rich enough to pay monthly or weekly fees, the reality is that millenials really do hold the power to ‘kill off’ businesses that require an arbitrarily large monetary investment

as a group, we simply do not care about brand loyalty and we’re known to flagrantly flout the traditional corporate mindset of ‘they’ll pay if they’re desperate enough for what we offer’ in favor of lower-cost solutions

And while it’s probably true that if tumblr begins to fail due to the addition of micro-charging fees, then Yahoo will still be able to safely shut down the website and cut their losses, the reality is that millenials are well-known to react to that kind of corporate greed with ugly smear campaigns that make the company look bad and lose support over time. I doubt that kind of backlash would pair well with the loss of advertising dollars that Yahoo is currently generating from a low-cost, net neutral tumblr.

so, yeah. there’s a reason op currently has just under 50,000 notes on this post. the likelihood is that the vast majority of us will simply stop using the internet as much as we currently do if net neutrality is revoked. Not only will this be a huge societal loss, but in the long run–make no mistake–it will lead to the death of the biggest web-based companies due to their failure to generate core revenue.