• Meghan Markle's first As Ever collection sold out within an hour of its launch.
• The Duchess of Sussex's show "With Love, Meghan" was also a hit when it was released in March.
• Despite vocal criticism, Meghan's pivot to lifestyle is off to a good start.

Meghan Markle just dropped her first lifestyle collection — and it's already sold out.

After months of anticipation, the Duchess of Sussex's lifestyle venture As Ever officially launched on Wednesday. The brand's entire collection sold out within an hour of it dropping online.

As Ever's triumphant launch follows the successful debut of the duchess' Netflix series "With Love, Meghan," which was a hit with viewers despite widespread criticism from the media and some fans who called the show boring and out of touch.

Despite that, Meghan is proving her bet on her lifestyle career was worth taking.

Entering the lifestyle space

Both "With Love, Meghan" and As Ever were met with plenty of criticism. Outlets published dozens of negative articles about the series when it was released, lamenting its lack of relatability for the average viewer and criticizing Meghan's hosting tips as unnecessary.

However, that criticism seemed detached from the show's successful reality. "With Love, Meghan" hit Netflix's top 10 list the week it premiered and amassed over 2.6 million views, according to The New York Times. Netflix also already announced that season two of the show will premiere in the fall of 2025.

As Ever is on a similar path. When it was first announced, naysayers questioned Meghan's product line, saying items like flower petal sprinkles were gratuitous or assuming she would overcharge for her products. Others questioned whether Meghan had a clear vision for the brand since she changed its name from American Riviera Orchard to As Ever, despite the swap being largely due to a trademark issue.

Lo and behold, it seems the Duchess of Sussex — and Netflix, her business partner in the brand — did have a clear vision for As Ever. As Ever blends the type of California luxury you might associate with Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop or Martha Stewart with royal elegance, creating a glossy feel that clearly appeals to buyers.

Stacy Jones, the founder and CEO of Hollywood Branded, told Business Insider Meghan and Netflix are creating a brand that seemingly reflects the duchess herself.

"She's not an A-list actress. She's an A-list personality," Jones said.

"She's really pushed herself back into that influencer side of it versus that celebrity side of it where her brand requires content to be created around her, either by her or by someone else," she added. "That's what Netflix is doing."

A sold-out collection

As Ever's first collection featured items that cost $12 to $15 — aside from a $28 limited-edition honey — and they sold out within an hour of its launch. The honey was gone in just five minutes.

Thanks to standard shipping, it will be a few days before people get to try the products they ordered. And although it's unclear how much merchandise was available to begin with, the launch itself was a win for Meghan.

Jones said the gap between the vocal criticism of Meghan's lifestyle ventures and their real-life success isn't surprising.

"People like to be able to complain and be really, really loud about that," she said. "The haters are gonna hate, but she has a fan base."

Meghan has meticulously built up her base over the past decade. Many of them started out as fans of her blog, The Tig, which she ran from 2014 to 2017. They loved her recipes and hosting tips before she ever knew Prince Harry.

"She had a consumer base who are probably still fans of hers," Jones said. "There's not been a big step away from where she was before, back in the days of actresshood and 'Suits,' but she's bringing in a new level of branding."

Jones also said that Meghan's fan base has proved fiercely loyal, sticking with her through her royal controversies. That makes them a huge asset for the duchess, which she seems aware of. As she shared on Instagram, Meghan reconnected with her "OG Tig girls" ahead of As Ever's launch.

Meghan is finding a sweet spot in the lifestyle world because it blends her passions and the glamour of royal life. She's finding a way to share that with the world, and the proof is in the pudding (or rather, the jam).

The Boston Red Sox have locked up somebody they hope to be a franchise cornerstone.

Kristian Campbell, one of their top prospects who made the big league club out of spring training, has signed an extension that could keep him with the club for the next 10 seasons.

The two sides agreed to an eight-year extension worth $60 million, ESPN reported. The team said the deal comes with club options for both the 2033 and 2034 seasons.

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Since Campbell was called up for opening day, he was under team control through 2030 — he'd make the league minimum for his first three seasons before arbitration kicks in.

Instead, the Sox and Campbell have decided to forgo all of that and be locked down for at least the next eight years.

Campbell has made an awesome first impression in the early going. The 22-year-old infielder is 6-for-16 (.375) with a home run. He played at all three levels of minor league ball last season and raked everywhere he went. He hasn't even yet played a home game at Fenway Park, but that will come on Friday.

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Understandably so, Campbell is the sixth-ranked prospect in the sport — all while another Sox prized phenom in outfielder Roman Anthony ranks second behind Roki Sasaki. Marcelo Mayer, a shortstop, is 11th. Anthony and Mayer both currently sit in Triple-A.

Campbell was not all that highly touted when he was drafted out of Georgia Tech in 2023, as he wasn't drafted until the fourth round. But hitting .330 with a .997 OPS in your first full season in the minors will bring you up faster than expected.

The last Red Sox player to win the Rookie of the Year was Dustin Pedroia in 2007 — he won the MVP the following season. Nomar Garciaparra, Fred Lynn, and Carlton Fisk also earned the award with Boston, with Lynn also winning the MVP in that same 1975 season.

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Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow.

Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release.

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A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General's office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats.

The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported.

Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ, but Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, "including hacking and other malicious cyber activity." Declining to comment further, the DOJ did confirm that as a "special government employee," like Musk, Stanley does not draw a government salary.

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If you’re watching Netflix shows and movies on a TV, the streaming service will now offer many more language options for subtitles and dubbing. 

Starting today, you’ll be able to “pick from the full list of available languages for any title when watching Netflix on your TV,” Netflix said in a blog post. When watching on a TV before this change, Netflix would only show “5-7 relevant languages on TV and TV-connected devices based on your location and language settings,” according to a support page.

A video from Netflix, which I’ve included below, shows what this looks like in practice: for example, a user can watch Bridgerton, a show in English, with Spanish dubbing and Korean subtitles or switch to a combination like Japanese dubbing and Portuguese subtitles.

This level of flexibility is already available when watching Netflix on a mobile device or a web browser, but Netflix says it’s been a “much-anticipated” feature for TVs.

• Conservative television network Newsmax has seen its stock skyrocket since going public on Monday.
• The investment bank that handled the public offering is a little-known firm called Digital Offering.
• A Digital Offering exec explains how the firm won the deal.

Newmax's stock debut may be the talk of Wall Street, but the investment bank behind the deal is not normally associated with the sector's splashiest IPOs.

Rather than using a large advisory firm like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, Newsmax tapped a relatively obscure advisor: Laguna Beach, California-based Digital Offering LLC, which has just six full-time registered bankers. The stock debut has helped put the bank on the map and is already driving new business to the firm, said Mark Elenowitz, a managing director at the firm, based in New York.

"It's huge for us," Elenowitz told Business Insider in an interview. "The small-cap community knows who we are, but the rest of Wall Street didn't."

Digital Offering advises companies valued at $1 billion or less — what's considered small potatoes for some bulge-bracket shops. The bank also specializes in the unconventional method Newsmax used to sell its stock to the public for the first time.

Rather than hire a bunch of banks to underwrite the IPO and sell the stocks to large investors in a roadshow, Newsmax relied on a lower-cost, less onerous form of a public offering termed Regulation A+, a provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2012.

The conservative news station raised $75 million selling 7.5 million shares at $10 each through this process, sometimes called the "mini IPO." Despite Newsmax losing $72 million in 2024, the stock shot up 735% on its first day of trading and another 180% on Tuesday to close up over 1,200% for the week at $233.

It could lead to a surge in demand for this type of offering and more business for firms like Digital Offering. Elenowitz said some mid-cap investment bank advisory firms have already reached out in recent days to express their desire to partner on public offerings structured similarly to Newsmax.

"They want us to help them," he said of this type of stock offering.

Working with Newsmax

The bank's relationship with Newsmax began in August 2023, Elenowitz recounted. At first, Digital Offering helped Newsmax raise $225 million in capital from accredited investors.

Newsmax wasn't aware of the Regulation A+ method for taking a company public, and Digital Offering was able to enumerate its vision. "We felt that it would really create visibility for the company beyond just raising money, but actually creating visibility for the brand," he said.

Elenowitz spearheaded the Newsmax transaction alongside Gordon McBean, the bank's cofounder and chairman and a veteran of Lehman Brothers and Wells Fargo; and Mike Boswell, an MD who also has business interests in the defense sector and blockchain technology.

Digital Offering saw Newsmax as the right candidate for a Regulation A+ offering because of its consumer appeal. Whereas a traditional IPO prioritizes large institutional investors, a Reg A offering lets companies raise money from accredited and non-accredited investors, including mom-and-pop retail investors.

"Instead of buying, as an institution, a million dollars and really being concerned, these are investors that are buying $500, $1000" worth of equity, "which gives management the time to stop worrying about their stock price and focus on growth their business."

The past 48 hours have been a rush for Elenowitz. The phones have been ringing off the hook, he and his team rejoiced over a celebratory dinner, and he and his wife are departing to Paris this weekend.

He said the highlight was ringing the trading bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. An exchange official handed Elenowitz a sheet of paper shortly after 10:51 a.m. that read, "Opening trade: 244,778 shares at $14."

"That, to me," he said, "was a historic moment."

Reed Alexander is a correspondent at Business Insider. He can be reached via email at [email protected], or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.

The WNBA celebrated Transgender Day of Visibility Monday, and one of its coaches appeared to take a shot at President Donald Trump.

Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve issued a statement saying there have been "executive and legislative attacks" on transgender people.

"On this transgender visibility day, a time of escalating executive and legislative attacks attempting to deny healthcare, education and basic freedoms; a time of epidemic violence, particularly against black and brown trans women — we celebrate trans and non-binary people everywhere. You are seen and loved," Reeve's statement said

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The team also posted a photo of Reeve wearing a shirt that said "Protect trans kids."

The league posted on X about its support for transgender people. It coincided with the final day of women’s history month. The post sparked reactions from women’s sports advocates who have championed Title IX and the efforts to keep biological males out of girls and women’s sports.

Four years to the day of Reeve's statement and the team's post, Reeve wrote an op-ed in Sports Illustrated, "We All Win When Trans Athletes Are Included." 

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"When we welcome all woman athletes, including transgender woman athletes, to bring their full authentic selves to the game, we are stronger as individual players and as a team," she wrote. "Transgender exclusion pits woman athletes against one another, reinforces the harmful notion that there is only one right way to be a woman and distracts us from the real threats to women’s sports."

Reeve also wrote that a transgender powerlifter banned from competing "simply cannot stand."

The WNBA celebrated Transgender Day of Visibility more than a month after Trump signed the "No Men in Women’s Sports" executive order in February. The NCAA changed its gender participation policy, but critics have pointed out loopholes in it.

The Trump administration has also clashed with Maine school officials due to the state’s refusal to reverse its policy on transgender athletes participating in girls and women’s sports. The Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights referred to the state’s "noncompliance with Title IX."

There are no players in the WNBA who have transitioned from male to female. Layshia Clarendon came out as nonbinary in 2020.

Fox News' Ryan Gaydos contributed to this report.

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The Xbox Series X and Series S are excellent machines directly out of the box, but there’s always room for improvement. Add-on accessories like the Elite Series 2 Controller and the Xbox Wireless Headset can help you get the most out of your new gaming console, while others, like Seagate and Western Digital’s expansion cards, can help ensure you have ample storage space to stow all of your favorite games.

Below, we’ve listed some of the best accessories available for the Series X and Series S, many of which often go on sale at most major retailers.

Controllers

Xbox Wireless Controller

The last-gen Xbox wireless controller from the Xbox One generation is compatible with the Series X / S consoles. However, the older controller lacks a few features only found in the newer, better version. For instance, the revised controller (which comes with every new Series X and Series S) has a dedicated button for saving and sharing clips and screenshots, a USB-C port for wired use or charging Microsoft’s play-and-charge rechargeable battery, and an improved D-pad.

In addition …

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• People are replying to posts on X — asking Grok: "Is this true?"
• It's a new form of dunking on someone on X, and it's making the old Twitter an even weirder place.
• There's a limit to how useful a chatbot like Grok can be on social platforms — and we're seeing it.

Lately, I've noticed something surprising on X: People are actually using Grok. Like, a lot.

Before I describe why this is kind of weird — and making X kind of weird — I should give a disclaimer that I generally find X to be worse than it used to be in both specific and vague ways.

I don't think Grok is to blame; it's more the boring reasons you've probably heard before: a lot of the lively and funny users I used to enjoy have quit the platform, the remaining users seem to be more combative, the "For you" feed is dominated by clickbaity viral video chum, there's a lot of spam and porn.

The thing that I've noticed outside all that stuff is this new phenomenon of asking Grok questions in a reply to a post. Typically, a person is asking Grok — Elon Musk's ChatGPT competitor —to explain the context of a tweet or to verify if something in the tweet is true.

Here's a made-up example of the kind of stuff I see:

@PersonA: The moon died because it was vaccinated

@PersonB: @grok, is this true?

@grok: The moon is not alive and, therefore, cannot be vaccinated.

When I describe it like that, it sounds very normal and useful, right? Well, in practice — as with a lot of things connected to LLMs — it sort of makes things … just weird.

How Grok responds

I've spent some time browsing the "Replies" tab of @Grok, which is a fascinating firehose of all the replies to various things people are asking it. (Note: I'm talking about publicly asking @Grok as a reply to a post on X — not the private conversations you can have with Grok.)

What I tend to see a lot: people responding to a political post with some sort of fact-check. The topics tend to be the kinds of things that some people might want to stir up fights about: Trump's policies, the history of Jews, immigration, Elon Musk, and a lot of questions related to Hitler. (There's also a lot of stuff that isn't in English, so I can't say what that's about.)

One recent "fact-check" came in response to a post from Musk himself:

(For this meme, Grok said no, it wasn't factual. I asked the person who runs the @Dispropganda account if they knew in advance they were going to get that answer, and they said, "I didn't know for sure, but I suspected.")

In theory, this is good, right? Finally, people are able to get fact-checks on posts and access to unbiased opinions!

But what Grok seems to be used for more often is a rhetorical cudgel, a debate tactic. It's not being used for earnest requests for information but as a new tool in the dunk utility belt.

I've seen people use it on posts they know aren't true — and are purposely getting Grok to point that out.

Asking Grok to weigh in on someone's tweet has its own passive-aggressive vibe. Instead of engaging the original poster, you're appealing to this automated thing.

The fact that people seem to be using it during debates on heated topics where people generally have entrenched ideas suggests that people aren't using it as a helpful resource during lively discussions. They're using it to fight and argue, to insult the other person. They're using Grok as an AI dunk assistant.

And instead of elevating the level of discourse on X with more truth and utility, it's just dragging it down with more nasty arguing and petty trolling. (X didn't immediately reply to a request for comment on this story.)

AI has its limits on social media

I'm not a total AI skeptic — I believe there can be some amazing things happening quite soon. But as far as getting an AI bot to engage with you on social media? I really think we're already seeing the limits here. It might be mildly useful in some limited instances, but it's not making the overall X experience better and certainly, in some cases, is making it slightly worse.

I don't mean to be sentimental, but part of the beauty of a text-based social platform is that you CAN just reply to people and engage with them, and, yes, even argue with them! Or if you see something that needs context, you can ask for it or just keep scrolling.

I saw someone ask Grok to explain the context of some deep stan lore tweet about Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber, and I kind of felt sad in a way. Back in MY day, you needed to actually spend tons of time watching the strange motions of the Seleners to be able to understand their garbled system of beliefs — and there was some beauty to that.

Now, you can have Grok — or another chatbot — just spit it out. I'm not sure that's a totally good thing.

Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.

The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast.

The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.

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The Boston Red Sox and starting pitcher Garrett Crochet reportedly agreed to a six-year, $170 million contract extension on Monday night.

Crochet, 25, was acquired in a trade with the Chicago White Sox in exchange for a bevy of prospects. The Red Sox traded away prospects Kyle Teel, Braden Montgomery, Chase Meidroth and Wikelman Gonzalez for Crochet. 

The agreed-upon extension begins in 2026 and includes an opt-out after the 2030 season, ESPN reported. Crochet will be 31 years old at the time of his opt-out. 

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The deal is the largest ever for a pitcher with four-plus years of service time, according to ESPN.

Crochet is the first pitcher in MLB history to receive a nine-figure contract while having thrown fewer than 800 innings. The 6-foot-6 left-hander has thrown just 224 career innings. 

With the White Sox, Crochet broke onto the scene as a reliever, pitching in 2020 and 2021 out of the bullpen. 

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He missed 2022 due to Tommy John surgery and then returned to the bullpen in 2023. Crochet transitioned into a starter going into 2024 and saw immediate success.

That season, Crochet started 32 games and had a 3.58 ERA across 146 innings while he struck out an impressive 209 hitters with his dominant fastball. He was named to the American League All-Star team. 

However, over the last two months of last season, Crochet struggled. In his final 10 starts, his ERA was 4.83 and he pitched just 31.2 innings. Despite the late-season struggles, the Red Sox still gave up a haul for Crochet. 

Crochet started on opening day for the Red Sox, and did not get a decision in the team’s 5-2 win over the Texas Rangers. Crochet pitched five innings, gave up two earned runs on five hits and two walks and struck out four batters.

The opening day win is the only victory the Red Sox have this season, as they have lost their last four games and are 1-4 on the season. 

Crochet will get the start in the Red Sox's next game against the Baltimore Orioles at 6:35 p.m. ET Wednesday.

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Occupy Wall Street, Notorious RBG, cottagecore. These and several other lasting internet trends and IRL movements of the 2010s were born not on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the mainstream media but on Tumblr. You might remember it as the blogging platform that became one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 (back when a billion still felt like a billion), then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z.

Zoomers have gravitated toward the pseudonymous platform, viewing it as a safe space as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers. As in its heyday, Tumblr is still more about sharing art, culture, and fandom than individual status. More posts about anime and punk rock than bridal trends and politics. In 2025, 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users are Gen Zers, as are 60% of new users signing up, according to data Tumblr shared with Business Insider. And several of Zoomers' icons, from the "Fault in Our Stars" author John Green to the pop superstar Halsey, have come back to the platform.

"Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021. She still uses her own Tumblr regularly as the internet's resident meme librarian. "It allows for experimentation that's not tied to your face."

Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them.

The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr. The blogging site was an online oasis in the barrage of horrifying news and conspiracy theories, thanks to its acute focus on art and pop culture. And when other platforms take hits, Tumblr benefits: User numbers spiked to coincide with the near-banning of TikTok in January and the temporary ban of X in Brazil last year. Tumblr seems to be a refuge for people searching for new social sites. In January, people launched communities on Tumblr to post and preserve their favorite TikTok videos. Meanwhile, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Facebook and X as punishment.

"Our menu has been full. There's been no more space to add something else," says Andrew Roth, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the Gen Z-focused research and consulting firm DCDX. In a poll of more than 600 Zoomers that DCDX conducted in 2024, two-thirds of respondents said they wanted their social media presence to become more private. Tumblr might be just what many young people are looking for. "Now the time feels more ripe for that to happen for Tumblr, even if Tumblr is doing the same thing or staying in the same spot."

Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr, tells me the platform is both "more peaceful" and more resolutely itself than its competitors. While Meta runs around aping its competitors' features (reels from TikTok, stories from Snapchat), it hasn't been able to mimic what Tumblr does (though Meta, then called Facebook, was in talks to buy Tumblr before Yahoo did). "How many times am I in an app and I no longer know what app I'm in?" Levine says.

And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14. He says he sees his blog as a "flow of consciousness" and a "diary," one that's mostly made up of reblogging things he finds interesting rather than original posts. In a way, that's a core part of what Tumblr has always done: It's far more focused on fandom and art than it is around single blogs becoming cults of personality.

Being an iconic and beloved cultural corner doesn't always lead to cash flows, however, and the site has had a troubled decade. Yahoo bought Tumblr when Tumblr was one of the world's fastest-growing social networks, and it promised not to "screw it up." But Tumblr's embedded anti-advertising and anti-influencer stances had driven a wedge between the site and monetization. The pseudonymous nature of Tumblr was a direct opposition to Facebook's insistence on users using their real names and faces, and the free-flowing adult content on the site scared advertisers off. Yahoo got left behind in the mobile revolution, and Tumblr, too, suffered, with Verizon scooping up both at discount. In 2018, Tumblr notoriously banned porn and pissed off users, which led 30% of them to quit. The next year, Verizon offloaded Tumblr to WordPress' owner, Automattic, for $3 million, 0.3% of what Yahoo had paid for it.

Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, Levine says. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says. The site is trying to keep what its users love while unveiling features that do rival some of its competitors'. It's a shift after years of staying distinctly itself. In December, Tumblr launched its Communities feature, a sort of Facebook Groups meets subreddits in which people can join groups based on specific interests, like making art of "silly bugs" or emo kids from the Midwest. In January, Tumblr also launched a TikTok competitor called Tumblr TV, which works like a search engine for GIFs and supports videos. And following media companies (including BI) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts.

But Tumblr is the 10th-most-popular social media site in the US, dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram, and X, according to data from the analytics firm Similarweb. (Tumblr declined to provide total user numbers to BI, but Levine says it has seen steady growth.) Its users see that as a pro rather than a con; it's more exclusive and intentional. But its history of extreme waves in valuation and struggles to make money may dictate its fate more than those who blog there. "I want Tumblr to flourish," Brennan says. "I want it to exist forever. I want to use it forever. I think that it is one of the most beautiful spaces on the internet for someone to figure out who they are." But some of Tumblr's model is a "blessing for it as a user is a curse for it as a business."

The platform could benefit if it capitalized on the "shift from attention to intention," Roth tells me. "How do we actually monetize people's intentions on social media versus the attention of them being around?" That would mean a focus on "people's desires" and how to "help them reach them." Tumblr recently put out a lengthy report for marketers trying to reach Gen Z, advising them to engage with communities around their brands and to search for relevant interest among users over the reach of mainstream influencers. Levine tells me that when Automattic acquired Tumblr, it was a chance for the company to take "stock of where we are" and "reintroduce ourselves" to users and "brands and advertisers who help us pay the bills."

Tumblr loyalists tell me they haven't spent much time with the new features — they like the site the way it is. TJ Smith, a 25-year-old from Texas, says it provided a safe haven for them when they were 13. Diagnosed as autistic at 11, Smith found Tumblr an easier place to connect with and talk about their favorite fandoms, like the Percy Jackson series. Eventually, it helped them work through their sexuality and gender identity (they identify as pansexual and gender fluid). "Tumblr was the first place where I saw those terms being used," Smith tells me.

Most Tumblr blogs aren't about the people who make them, yet they're deeply personal places. Under their pseudonyms and art, people find communities and explore identities without scrutiny from IRL friends and family. Ashmita Shanthakumar, a 25-year-old from Utah who has been on Tumblr since 2013, sees it as "anti-social media," she tells me, and has used it to connect with people who like the same CW superhero shows as she did. She can focus on how the shows make her feel rather than personal updates on Facebook, which can feel comparative.

The social internet is fractured. Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence. People of different ages migrate in numbers to various platforms and seize them, creating the vibes and culture there. Platforms lean more left or right politically. And while some (mostly on the right) have cried "echo chamber" with derision, there are benefits to carving out smaller communities with like-minded people to see and talk about the things you like. Megaplatforms can flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold; smaller communities can enrich them.

I recently unearthed the Tumblr blog I made in high school (don't go looking — I deleted it and my teenage musings immediately). When I scrolled through Tumblr for the first time in at least a decade, I realized it still had something that no other social network did: the sense of timelessness. I saw a post of a simple, soothing color gradient followed by a recent reblog of a GIF posted in 2020 but taken from the 2002 original "Spider-Man" movie. There's still little video on the feed, and it's more of a silent, visual retreat, with cuts of movie scenes overlaid with dialogue on a loop. When I open TikTok and Instagram, I'm bombarded by filtered faces and music, or someone yelling into the camera to sell me a pair of magnetic eyelashes every few videos. Tumblr was the place I went in 2011 to see and reblog flash photography and '90s movie GIFs, so it's no surprise that it's no longer a place where decades of images are juxtaposed together, but one that has itself become a piece of nostalgia for a simpler time online. Unlike some of its 2000s peers, Tumblr doesn't need to fight to get its cool back, but it does have to find ways to keep its cool and move forward.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.