Tumblr Follows Instagram - Reveals Plan For More Ads 75
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.
Selling data to advertisers? (Score:4, Informative)
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:Sick of hearing about Tumblr. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.