Tumblr Follows Instagram - Reveals Plan For More Ads

cagraham writes "Following close on the heels of Instagram's advertising announcement last week, Tumblr has signed an agreement with analytics firm DataSift to provide info to advertisers on user behavior. According to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, who oversaw the recent $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, advertising on the site will become increasingly prevalent throughout 2014. DataSift will provide advertisers with info on the 5.5 billion interactions that occur on the site each day. This makes Tumblr the latest in a slew of recent tech companies to turn towards targeted ads in an attempt to generate revenue." Twitter is another customer of DataSift.

Comments

D: D: D:

[pseudofrog]

my feels! i can't...

Re:Sigh

[plover]

And nothing of value was corrupted.

targetted ads

[themushroom]

Does this mean we'll start seeing something semi-worthwhile on Radar rather than what American Apparel mistakenly thinks kids should buy or the latest flash-in-the-pan Fox TV drama?

Allow me to reveal my plan for Tumblr use

[JoeyRox]

The plan is to use it less. So let's call it a wash.

Re:Allow me to reveal my plan for Tumblr use

[Great Big Bird]

There are many things about tumblr that are nice from the interface that is ideal way to present those things. But the ads will kill it. Somebody will reproduce it if it is that good, or forget it if alternatives come.

Re:Allow me to reveal my plan for Tumblr use

[interkin3tic]

Aw, but now where am I going to go for porn?

Oh, right, the rest of the internet. Never mind.

the irony

[themushroom]

Yahoo getting targetted ads on Tumblr to find out what its users want... then ignoring when users on Flickr try to tell Yahoo what they want.

driving the coffin nails

[themushroom]

The moment we heard Marissa was buying Tumblr, we all knew death was imminent. Flickr's the test case to prove it.

Selling data to advertisers?

[swillden]

I really, really dislike that model for targeted advertising, and I'm surprised Mayer would sign up for it, rather than using the Google model of keeping the data in house and doing the targeting themselves, so that advertisers never see it. At least that way you only have to keep your eye on one possible misuser of your data (well, plus government agencies who decide to target you for their user data requests).

I suppose making effective use of the data yourself is a lot harder than selling it. But, as I understand it, Google's ability to use the data more effectively than advertisers themselves would is a big part of Google's success. I guess Mayer doesn't think Yahoo! has the know-how to do it as well.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, which may bias me here. I don't think it does, because I felt the same way before I started working for Google, but it's possible.)

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Texting replaced email because texting is much more transient in nature and the younger crowd have the attention span of a goldfish.

Instagram is 'texting' for image sharing. I can't remember the name of the 6 second video clip platform that's popular right now, but it's very transient in nature too.

Facebook is so "permanent" and these youngin's don't want to remember what they did last week let along see their entire timeline.

Of course this whole "done and gone" mentality does not bode well for things in 10 years when this group has responsibilities and commitments.

Abe Simpson: We're doomed I tells ya! Dooooooooomed!!

Re:Sick of hearing about Tumblr.

[_merlin]

How do you expect it to survive without a revenue model? People won't keep throwing capital at it forever. It needs to become profitable somehow or it'll be going away soon anyway.

Re:Sick of hearing about Tumblr.

[_merlin]

It requires server hardware, data centre space, storage media, backups, power, bandwidth, system administrator time, and at least some development time for maintenance and bug fixes. Online advertising generates very little revenue because of low conversion from impressions to sales, so it's not like they're going to be making a fortune out of it.

Honestly, how do you expect this to be funded? Would you be prepared to sign up for a paid subscription to read it? That never seems to go over well either. Should the writers pay some fee depending on readership? If it's close enough to free that advertising on it is immoral, why don't you set up a competing service for free?

Metastatic snooping

[Ol Olsoc]

If it were just Tumbler, or Twitter, or Facebook or Google following their users, that might be at least people going there and knowing their every click was being monitored.

Here's a little experiment. Y'all do have NoScript running right? rIght? Reset it to defaults. Prepare for an onslaught.

Yahoo home page:

go.com, fwmrm.net, facebook.net,media.net,sitescout.com, yieldmanager.com, interclick.com, yldmgirng.net .

Now I thought Yahoo was bad - but wait, there's more

Did a web search on "New York Times" on yahoo went to their site their site....

adsafeprotected.com, googlesyndication.com, nyt.com, moatads.com, serving-sys.com, nytimes.com

Now on the same page, I'll temporarily allow all those. Now we have more friends running scripts on the same page:

Facebook.net, chartbeat.com, revsci.net, krxd.net, scorecardresearch.com, brightcove.com

So Let's allow all those once again. Huh... another script:

facebook.com

So for just the NYT home page, there are 13 scripts hard at work.

Going through some other pages on the same site, we get typekit.com, stats.com, ticketnetwork.com, insightexpressai.com, buzzfeed.com, doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, pointroll.com, dl-rms.com, questionmarket.com

Typekit.com, brightcove.com, and ticketnetwork.com are the only ones not specifically looking you over and tracking and or generating what you see by what you clickk on.

But just on one website, we have at least 22 scripts designed to follow you around.

I know a lot of people here use noscript, and this might be old news to them. But newcomers might benefit from what is happening.

Re:Metastatic snooping

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

For Firefox users, Stanford research discovered recently that using a script-blocking extension actually isn't as effective at privacy protection as using privacy & ad-blocking lists with an ad-blocking extension (I use AdBlock Plus). I double-checked the domains you listed, and all of them appeared in at least one of the blocklists, either blocking everything from their sites or blocking things from being executed from another domain.

If you're in Firefox (and have a *lot* of patience/time), you might like another whitelisting-based extension they labeled extremely effective, though:
"Request Policy, a Firefox extension, takes the opposite approach: all requests to third-party domains are blocked, save those the user explicitly allows. While Request Policy offers nearly comprehensive protection from third-party tracking, properly configuring it requires substantially greater patience and expertise than the average user can reasonably be expected to possess."

The Myspace problem.

[gallondr00nk]

I wonder occasionally if advertising is the next overinflated bubble fit to burst.

Companies or investors are buying into these vast userbases (which is essentially what is being sold) on the broad assumption that somehow advertising revenue will return the investment. Yet in almost every case this has proved spurious as the trends are so volatile.

Tumblr has never made a profit and yet is worth over $1 billion simply because people believe that advertising is worth that much. It seems to be an act of faith in much the same way as people believed that housing was an investment that always grew, or you couldn't lose buying technology stock in the late 90's.

The foundations of this advertising collossus seem no more secure than those of the financial one, and we all know how well that ended up.