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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Metastatic snooping

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

For Firefox users, Stanford research discovered recently [stanford.edu] 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 [requestpolicy.com], 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."