They've been selling premium themes for some time now.

Honest question: Revenue streams of the host company are an important consideration in choosing a blog platform for you?

Seems reasonable. If they run out of money, where does your blog go?

With most platforms that is a valid concern, but with Tumblr you can easily create a local backup your entire blog (http://staff.tumblr.com/post/286303145/tumblr-backup-mac-bet...) as basic HTML, images, assets, theme, etc.

With that said, Tumblr has a very bright future ahead of them.

Sure, but then you're stuck setting up again elsewhere - so why not do it from the start?

Answer to rhetorical question: because we can't be bothered, so we'd rather just pick a provider who is more likely to stick around than not.

That's a totally reasonable consideration but the revenue model of the host platform isn't always the best indicator of its success or longevity.

LiveJournal & Six Apart have longstanding revenue models but aren't hosting users like the President of the United States or large corporate media entities.

Sure, but they're still around. Or are you implying that the President and Corporation, Inc. would bail Tumblr out to keep their blog up?

BTW, that backup app is even less reliable than the rest of Tumblr. I did manage to get a full backup... once.

If you plan to stick to the platform for a long while, they better have.

I don't know, everything is pretty portable these days. (user data/blog databases) I don't think most folks chose Wordpress on the financial strength of Automattic, do they?

It's a reasonable enough consideration for folks like us in this venue, the parent comment just jumped out at me as an interesting reason not to give the platform a whirl.