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This is exactly why I’m not concerned by Yahoo!-sparked Tumblr-community revolt. Tumblr started ads a year ago in May 2012. They’ve slowly added more and more ads, and they were on the verge of getting even more aggressive. Some users have complained and mocked… but they don’t flee. (I would love to know about all the awesome ad-free social platforms they’re going to, though :D). Also, there are many reasons to suspect Yahoo!’s ad infrastructure will allow for targeting that Tumblr currently can’t do. Which means no college students in dorms seeing Home Depot ads. :D dailydot: Tumblr’s advertising problem summed up in 1 orange cat Now that Yahoo has purchased Tumblr, a good deal of speculation has gone into the question of, you know, what the hell Yahoo is going to do with it. A blog post by noted media analyst John Battelle floated the idea that it’s all about Tumblr’s native advertising system, something Yahoo is just beginning to explore. There’s just one problem with that hypothesis: Tumblr users hate Tumblr’s native ads.

This is exactly why I’m not concerned by Yahoo!-sparked Tumblr-community revolt. Tumblr started ads a year ago in May 2012. They’ve slowly added more and more ads, and they were on the verge of getting even more aggressive. Some users have complained and mocked… but they don’t flee. (I would love to know about all the awesome ad-free social platforms they’re going to, though :D).

Also, there are many reasons to suspect Yahoo!’s ad infrastructure will allow for targeting that Tumblr currently can’t do. Which means no college students in dorms seeing Home Depot ads. :D

dailydot:

Tumblr’s advertising problem summed up in 1 orange cat

Now that Yahoo has purchased Tumblr, a good deal of speculation has gone into the question of, you know, what the hell Yahoo is going to do with it. A blog post by noted media analyst John Battelle floated the idea that it’s all about Tumblr’s native advertising system, something Yahoo is just beginning to explore.

There’s just one problem with that hypothesis: Tumblr users hate Tumblr’s native ads.

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18 minute (!) interview with Marissa Mayer + David Karp re: Yahoo!’s Tumblr purchase, conducted by CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla.

They do a good job fending off the tired porn FUD.

summary:

Mayer: Tumblr has less porn than its peers (chew on that! -ed)
Karp: Tumblr is so big, it’s easy to advertise against the billions of other posts without appearing next to porn.

Mayer also says some interesting things about what it takes to make a successful advertising platform:

“advertising platforms that work really well, work at scale. Tumblr has about 25 sales people. we have about 2500. And that really provides turn-key monetization. If you start to say ‘let’s build up demand for that advertising, let’s figure out the pricing model,’ that does take time, and… that’s something that yahoo! and other larger companies have figured out.”

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Yahoo! May 20th 2PM/5PM special event livestream URL

It’s not guaranteed tonight’s Yahoo! event is all about Tumblr (after all, we just had an investor conference call all about it).

But given that it’s in New York (Yahoo! is otherwise based in California), there’s a decent chance there’ll be something Tumblr-ish going on.

Yahoo! livestream URL here: http://screen.yahoo.com/yahoo-event-155000760.html

I’ve embedded the event player below, as well.

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purple hazing

This is what we, in the Tumblr business, call a welcome noogie. 

continuants:

shortformblog:

kyriarchy:

shortformblog:

yahoo:

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I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and…

Note to Yahoo: If you post images in text posts, they don’t look as good on the dashboard as straight-up image posts. You guys are new here, so we’ll give you some time to get used to things.

note to SFB: if you’re going to tell someone how to use tumblr, don’t reblog their text post as a link.

Note to kyriarchy: Maybe we wanted to encourage people to click on the link and read the full post on Yahoo’s Tumblr. (It gives people traffic. That’s what we in the sarcasm business call a “nice gesture.”)

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Marissa Mayer using secondary Tumblr, not recommended

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Just noticed that Marissa Mayer is using a secondary blog on Tumblr. 

This is a common “wish I woulda known” issue for Tumblr noobs, and often causes problems.

Secondary blogs are when Tumblr lets you create additional blogs under your “main,” account, without having to sign-up separately for each one (unlike Twitter + Pinterest, which have rigid one-email, one-presence rule).

The problem with secondary blogs is that when you interact (Follow/Subscribe, Like, etc), the interaction comes from your primary username. Then people try to browse/follow you based on that primary username, without ever knowing about secondary URL/name. They assume the primary blog is “you,” and (possibly) follow a tumblr you didn’t intend for them to follow, even an empty/blank one. (In other words, the Discovery vector for secondary blogs is much more narrow. “No, that’s not me, follow me over here.”)

It looks like they grabbed the “marissamayer.tumblr.com” sub-domain to make sure nobody squatted it (I blogged about the new URL while trying to smoke out the Yahoo! acquisition rumor.), but then they made a secondary Tumblr with the stylized “e-less” R spelling of Mayer- Mayr, as a nod to Tumblr’s spelling, and that’s the tumblr she’s publishing with. Her second sub-domain is clever + fun, but they shouldn’t have made it a secondary blog.

If there are two URLs you want to preserve, I’d recommend making two separate Tumblr accounts, making each a “primary” blog.

(Secondary blogs have their place. And in general, letting users create additional blogs without having to re-register with different email addresses is very friendly, and something other social platforms could learn from.)

For more about how Tumblr secondary blogs work, check out this tutorial on by user unwrapping.

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earlier, discovering the placeholder this weekend, pre-announcement:

bluechoochoo:

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Just followed: http://marissamayer.tumblr.com

An imperfect science (maybe somebody is just URL squatting?), but how can you resist?

[update: Somebody asked how checked the age of the URL. 
I used this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.

There are many tools like it, it’s not necessarily the best. Checking the age of a URL (as opposed to the age of a domain) is an inexact science, as merely not being indexed could make a domain appear newer than it is. That said, the theme used (Tumblr’s current default theme), is another clue this is a pretty new URL).]