Posts tagged Tumblr
“I still can’t believe we got them to say ‘blogosphere’.”
Via XKCD.
Thinking Through the Headline
We try to teach each other here at the FJP and our latest learnings look at writing headlines and titles on Tumblr.
While Tumblr specific, I hope this document can also help others who are teaching or trying to learn how to write headlines and titles more generally.
The Google doc is here. You can download the PDF here. — Michael
Tumblr’s Advertising Strategy
Digiday’s Josh Sternberg gets to the bottom of Tumblr’s Ad strategy, one that attempts to deliver value to brands without pissing off Tumblr’s community:
For years, David Karp, Tumblr’s CEO, has professed his disdain for advertising. That’s now changing. But he’s now wagering that Tumblr can essentially opt out of the overall Internet ad system thanks to its size and influence.
Tumblr is betting advertisers will be taken with its impressive reach. According to ComScore, Tumblr had 58 million uniques in March 2012 (more than double what its tally in March 2011). It also boasts a passionate, young user base receptive to a Tumblr-specific ad system that operates outside of the industry’s standard display ad formats.
“The overall thesis of what we’re trying to do is empower and highlight interesting creative advertising,” said Derek Gottfrid, Tumblr’s vp of product. “It’s not meant for the direct-response crowd.”
That’s why it has set a $25,000 minimum for buying placement in “Radar,” the space Tumblr reserves on user dashboards to highlight interesting Tumblr accounts. The bet is this placement can act in a similar fashion as Twitter’s “promoted” ad products.
Tumblr is rolling the dice on being able to opt out of the regular ad system. Advertisers won’t be able to easily marry their Tumblr campaigns with what they’re doing on other sites. Tumblr is also pushing its own set of metrics for success — number of reblogs, replies to posts, likes, number of new followers — in addition to impressions. This typically doesn’t go over well with brands since it makes it harder to evaluate how their campaigns are performing. There’s even grumbling about these problems with Facebook….
Essentially, brands can’t re-use the same IAB compliant ad creative they use to buy ad space on publications such as the NYTimes.com, CNN.com, Vogue.com, ESPN.com, etc. So there’s a cost to producing unique ad creative for a single media platform.
Gottfrid’s argument: digital advertising has made great strides in direct response, but Tumblr believes advertising in social is lacking. Google AdWords hasn’t been a great place for creative. Twitter has momentum but is not a place for creative storytelling. Same with Facebook. Tumblr is trying to tap into the creativeness that thrives on the platform and also let its users interact with brands in a creative way….
Agreed. Online everyone seems to be fixated on direct response rather than building brand awareness.
Packages start at $25,000 and brands that buy in can highlight one of its posts — typically images or text, but all post types (quotes, links, chats, audio and video) are available to be to be included in the Radar — so that users will see, and then hopefully share the content. As of now, there are four members of the ad sales team, and the company hopes to have about a dozen by the end of the year. It is also rolling out self-service tools for smaller marketers.
No ads will run on individual Tumblr pages, just the dashboard.
I think Twitter has a similar buy-in of about $15,000, which brands can then spend to:
- Scale followers (with Promoted Accounts)
- Extend reach (through Promoted Tweets)
- Ramp awareness (through Promoted Trends)
Ads Coming to Tumblr Radar
But don’t call them ads.
Via Business Insider:
In a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp said, “We’re pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomachs.”
How times have changed. Karp announced at Ad Age’s Digital Conference that on May 2, Tumblr will start offering advertisers the ability to buy an ad unit on Tumblr Radar, which highlights the site’s top posts and gets approximately 120,000 impressions a day.
“I was probably being an idiot then,” Karp said of his earlier renunciation of all advertising. His conversion is relatively recent—on April 12 he told Ad Age that advertising was “a complete last resort.”
Tumblr spokesperson Katharine Barna added that the real estate being offered to advertisers was “not an ‘ad unit’ per se, but a package of native promotion for the Tumblr post ― the most essential and versatile piece of our network.”
Last week Advertising Age interviewed Karp and asked a basic question: “Can the Company Be a Business Without Traditional Advertising?”
Tumblr Firehose Now Brought to you by Gnip
Gnip, a Colorado-based startup that provides data streams from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, announced an exclusive deal to distribute the Tumblr firehose.
Gnip, and services like it, is used by companies to monitor conversation and activity across social networks.
Via Gnip CEO Chris Moody:
I’m thrilled to announce that the full firehose of public Tumblr posts is now available exclusively from Gnip. Tumblr is one of the fastest growing social networks in the world. Much of this growth is fueled by the enormous number of conversations that are unique to the Tumblr community. These conversations cover a huge range of subjects, from movies, TV shows and fashion to business, apparel and consumer products…
…It doesn’t take a large leap to see the impact this type of information can have on brand management and product development. The conversations on Tumblr are rich in images and discussion about brands and products, from simply sharing a picture about a favorite pair of shoes to reblogging news about favorite brand. And given the highly social nature of the Tumblr community, these discussions move quickly and broadly through the community. You often see posts that are shared tens of thousands of times. For brands, every conversation matters and access to the full firehose ensures they won’t miss a thing.
Moody notes that 50 million new posts appear on Tumblr each day and that the network had 300% traffic growth last year.
WIGGLE YOUR TUMBLR NAME(S) AROUND.
UNWASHED NERD TARTLETS -or- DAUNTLESS, TENDER WRATH.
Rolls right off the tongue.
HMM! AT THE TITS
PICKLE POP ECSTATIC!
I just got my next song title. :)
I’m White Yank.**
**Totally putting this on a shield and running into battle. Don’t question me, I’m the White Yank.
“I AM A PITTANCE TO LAD” - da hale is this??? haha
Let’s pause for some fun.
“JET HOT OZZIE” … hmmmm … I guess I’ll take it? If you’re gonna be hot, be jet hot.
FJP: We’re in — Ur Fun Jams Projectile Tour.
Tumblr provides interface for users to view image metadata.
From A Trip Across the Solar System, one of 34 photos. Here, a view of the Sun on March 7, 2012, seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looping lines reveal solar plasma that is rising and falling along magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere, or corona. The brighter prominence at upper left is named solar active region 1429, which has already released several large solar flares, some accompanied by large explosions of solar plasma known as coronal mass ejections. (NASA/SDO)
In Focus, our news photography blog, is on Tumblr. Instafollow!
FJP: Done!
Dot Tumblr Dot Com
Tumblr Inches Into Media
Tumbling about Tumblr…
From Digiday
Like fellow platforms Google, Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr rejects the label media company. But unlike them, it’s not as shy about getting into the creation business.
Earlier this month, the hot blogging platform-cum-social network made an interesting move in hiring two writers to cover the Tumblr universe. Chris Mohney, formerly of Black Book, and ex-Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett are heading up an editorial team whose focus is to write about the 42 million users of Tumblr. The duo plan to hire more writers and build a full-fledged publication dedicated to the sprawling universe of Tumblrs, which range from photos of cats with bread on their heads (don’t ask) to offshoots of top-line publications like Newsweek, The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
This isn’t the first time Tumblr has made a move into content. For the third season in a row, the company has sent a small band of bloggers to cover New York’s Fashion Week, during which five New York-based Tumblr users posted images and content from behind the scenes…
Let's Pause for a Moment and Praise Tumblr's Engineers
We’re on Tumblr. If you’re reading this you’re (probably) on Tumblr.
And if you’re on Tumblr and we’re on Tumblr we have a shared history of great times, fun people and… unfortunate downtimes.
These don’t happen as much as they used to in our neck of the woods.
And that’s because Tumblr is scaling… everywhere.
As in, it gets 15 billion page views a month, has a peak rate of 40 thousand requests per second, collects more or less three terabytes of new content a day, all running on approximately one thousand servers.
And they’re doing this with about 20 engineers.
If you’re a geek, a friend of a geek, or simply sympathetic (and/or empathetic) to geeks that build platforms and keep them running so that the rest of us can do what we do, read High Scalability’s article on Tumblr’s architecture, its goals, and the hurdles it’s facing as it tries to reach those goals.
In it, Blake Matheny, Tumblr’s Distributed Systems Engineer, guides us through stats, software, hardware, architecture and lessons learned.
It’s mesmerizing, in a geeky sort of way.
In the meantime, it’s Valentines tomorrow. Consider sending the Tumblr crew a slew of hugs and kisses.
FJP: While we’re in the screenshot above we’d like to note that we’re not one of Tumblr’s hires. Nor do we imagine any of the others pictured here are.
Via the New York Times:
Chris Mohney, a senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media, will be the site’s editor in chief. Jessica Bennett, a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will be the executive editor and, she said, a kind of Tumblr correspondent.
“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”
Their work — both documenting the Tumblr service and marketing it to users — will appear on the Web site’s staff blog and on a separate part of tumblr.com that has not been set up yet, a Tumblr spokeswoman said Wednesday.
The Economist + Pressly + Tumblr = Electionism
The Economist recently launched a 2012 presidential HTML5 site for tablets called Electionism and uses a nifty bit of MacGyvering to get it done.
It appears the Economist Group Media Lab is using Tumblr as a backend where they curate content from various news sources. These feed into Pressly, a startup that pulls RSS feeds and Twitter posts, and extracts the content contained within links for magazine-style tablet display.
Pictured above are various screens from a tablet display and includes the Electionism Home, Category, Twitter and articles. The site currently works on the iPad, Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire.
Interested in following the actual Electionism Tumblr? That’s over here.
Select images to embiggen.
H/T: Journalism.co.uk.
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