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.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too old to care about tumblr or Instagram... Or what people share on them.
And I don't get why people find it interesting?

Now get of my lawn. :D

Re:Sigh

[plover]

And nothing of value was corrupted.

Re:

[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

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

tl

Re:

[RaceProUK]

I can't remember the name of the 6 second video clip platform that's popular right now

Vine

D: D: D:

[pseudofrog]

my feels! i can't...

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?

Re:

[eek_the_kat]

rule 34

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:

[neverwhere9]

Really? They annoy me. I can see they try to get the Tumblr crowd, but normally I find the efforts kind of embarrassing, like an old person in a Lana del Rey T-Shirt trying to talk to a group of young hipsters.

Re:

[interkin3tic]

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

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

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Just install AdBlock and the usual privacy enhancing add-ons for your browser.

I wonder if they try to detect the number of users blocking ads and factor it into their decision to increase advertising or not.

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.

Re:

[_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:

[spire3661]

They are trying to monetize something that should be almost free. They are injecting ads to make money off something that should cost almost nothing to run. Its parasitic. They arent injecting ads to improve the service, but to leech cash. Its an economic model that should be mocked and derided at every turn.

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?

Re:

[vux984]

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.

The reality is that the price per user really is ALMOST FREE. But no, its not quite, and will never be completely free.

However, 50 million users paying 50 cents per year? Do you think you could run it for $2 million+ per month? I'm thinking that's likely to be very doable.

If we could get a decent micro-payments infrastructure to

Re:

[_merlin]

If we could get a decent micro-payments infrastructure together we would easily fund these things "ad-free" and "tracking-free". Who out there would REALLY balk at 50 cents a year for that?

That's a very big "if" and no-one's managed to do it so far. Meanwhile they still need money to operate while waiting for this ubiquitous micropayment system to become accepted. It would be nice if you could run things this way, but it doesn't seem to work in real life.

Re:

[xenobyte]

Actually it would make sense to have the users pay a one-time signup fee of $10-$15. That's over two years of 50 cents a month membership, minus the monthly administration. Should be both possible and a good idea.

Re:

[vux984]

pay a one-time signup fee of $10-$15. That's over two years of 50 cents a month membership

Take Facebook, which is one of the largest and most complicated products out there -- compared to say twitter or tumblr which are a lot simpler.

It's got about $6B in annual revenue, and claims 1.15B monthly active users. FB claims ~25% profit margins. Meaning it needs $4.50/user/year to break even. So yeah, $10-$15 for two year memberships would ABSOLUTELY fund a facebook without facial recognition, profiling, advertis

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Why don't you run it then? Hosting that much content, accessed by that many people takes some serious resources. You can't just spend $10 a month on a shared host and call it a day.

Re:

[gagol]

You can, but it will suck badly. Over time it gets cheaper and cheaper to operate such simple services.

Re:

[_merlin]

How do you expect it to survive without a revenue model?

I expect them to make a value proposition that attracts a sufficient number of users to their service.

But once they have the "sufficient number of users" how do they make money out of them to pay for provision of the service, and provide some kind of return on investment? Users alone don't represent ROI.

Perhaps, adding ads is that proposition. I don't want to see ads, no matter how masterfully targeted. Ads are simply a non-starter as far as paying fo

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo hasn't done anything well in house for a while now and that's essentially the nucleus of its dysfunction.

Google does a lot of good work in house and the sad thing is that Marissa Mayer isn't showing any signs of bringing that over to Yahoo. So far her management has shown signs of being superficial. As CEOs go, superficial management is about par. You can do worse, but Yahoo needs better than average to come out of its malaise.

Google's Stephen Elop?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Well the superficial changes she's made so far makes Yahoo more and more like Google that I'm beginning to think Mayer is Google's equivalent of Stephen Elop. She's not exactly running Yahoo to the ground the way Elop did but then again Google tend to have more finesse than Microsoft's embrace and extinguish approach to the competition. Google's fine with coop-tition so long as you don't threaten their bread-and-butter ad-nalytics business. So there you have Google happily funding Mozilla's yearly operation

Re:

[swillden]

Google's ability to use the data more effectively than advertisers themselves would is a big part of Google's success.

The only big part of googles success was buying Doubleclick.

Google was hugely successful long before buying Doubleclick, and the impression ads business is still much smaller than the click ad business.

BTW How much do you people get paid to post on slashdot? I'd imagine an advertising company like google has special employees for "social media outreach".

Google does have PR people, but I'm not aware of anyone who does "social media outreach". Of course, I hardly know about everything. Personally, I get paid to write code. I do post on /. during business hours, but, just like the rest of you, it's time taken away from what I'm supposed to be doing.

Re:

[0ld_d0g]

Google model of keeping the data in house and doing the targeting themselves

FYI: You guys share Google Analytics data with "others" (Whoever pays Google I guess) after supposedly anonymizing it. I wonder how many people are actually aware of it. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en [google.com]

Re:

[swillden]

Yes, aggregated, anonymized trend data is sold. It's a minor, but not trivial, revenue source for Google. I don't think that's what DataSift is doing though. They appear to be selling individual user information.

Re:

[0ld_d0g]

Yes, aggregated, anonymized trend data is sold. It's a minor, but not trivial, revenue source for Google.

Well I don't really know about other divisions. I just happened to run into this because I setup a google adwords account recently for our company and managed to catch this setting and turn it off. More importantly, the terms of service allows google to sell any data to anyone.

For e.g.

----------------
Your TOS states:

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such a

Re:

[swillden]

And your privacy policy states:

We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances apply:

We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example, we may share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. ----------------

Not exactly comforting.

No? Perhaps we have different standards of comfort, but it seems pretty good to me. The first clause says that Google may outsource data processing, but that whoever they outsource to must follow the same rules as Google. The second says Google will only sell aggregated, anonymized data.

When things are going good user privacy is important from a PR perspective but when things go bad and wall street/investors/other idiot MBA types turn on the pressure, most companies fold and will sell out to make money.

Well, at least as long as Page, Brin and Schmidt are in charge, Wall Street and other MBAs don't have much say. Those three outvote the rest of the shareholders combined. And Google is pretty light on MBAs in general, especi

Re:

[0ld_d0g]

No? Perhaps we have different standards of comfort, but it seems pretty good to me. The first clause says that Google may outsource data processing, but that whoever they outsource to must follow the same rules as Google. The second says Google will only sell aggregated, anonymized data.

I wanted to contrast the language difference between TOS and Privacy Policy. A TOS is something "I Agree" to whereas a Privacy Policy is just something Google tells me it might or might not do with my data. A huge difference. It is evident in the language too, TOS allows Google to sell personally identifiable data, while privacy policy states they wont. Privacy Policies are not legally binding - so its merely a PR thing. TOS gives Google rights - for e.g. to kick a user out of their service whenever they w

Re:

[swillden]

Privacy Policies are not legally binding - so its merely a PR thing. TOS gives Google rights - for e.g. to kick a user out of their service whenever they want - without giving the *user* any rights - other than what the privacy policy states they might do.

I think privacy policies are more meaningful than you imply. I believe they create promissory estoppel.

Well, nothing stops individual employees from leaking/spying on data anyway. And it has happened .. at Google [wired.com]/Facebook [digitaljournal.com]/etc, so all the security in the world will only stop external script-kiddies and other low-level information hackers but cant stop anyone who is motivated enough.

Actually, there is a lot that stops individual employees from leaking/spying. The article you mentioned was three years old, and it described things that happened earlier. There is a lot of infrastructure in place today to prevent unauthorized employee access that wasn't there 3-4 years ago. I happen to know that very well, because I design and build a lot of it -- and 95% of all of my effort is devoted to

Re:

[0ld_d0g]

I think we've gotten fairly off-topic here so I'll just let this be my last response.
--

I think privacy policies are more meaningful than you imply. I believe they create promissory estoppel.

Its never been tested so we'll never know. Besides, the point is moot since nobody can expect an average user to sue giant corporations - given their army of lawyers.

Google has a really excellent security story, and I think we should be telling it. But since we aren't all I can say is: It's awesome, trust me :-)

Okay. I'll take that at face value.

We disagree on the need for an explicit opt-in, and I do think that Google's business model is a reasonable one, and one that's good for users.

When I type google.com into a browser, I am not expressing any intent for Google to track me. Google is simply assuming that the fact that any packets are routed through their networks gives them the right to inspect and tra

Re:

[swillden]

Besides, the point is moot since nobody can expect an average user to sue giant corporations - given their army of lawyers.

Class action. Or, alternatively, legislative action. Google is fully cognizant of both of those possibilities, and that at Google's size and public visibility one or both would happen.

When I type google.com into a browser, I am not expressing any intent for Google to track me.

Intent, no, permission yes.

Google is simply assuming that the fact that any packets are routed through their networks gives them the right to inspect and track/save them.

Do your packets get routed through Google's network? Not unless you're on Google Fiber, and if you are Google doesn't assume any such right.

But you're not talking about packets which you're sending somewhere else which happen to flow through Google, you're talking about packets that you send to Goo

Re:

[gagol]

Internet became available to the general population instead of being restrained to the scholars and researchers. I say it is not a bad thing. Maybe its time to create a new slashdot without the AC shit.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And roads were better too before cars became commonplace.

Before: no dust, no smoke, no risk of getting every bone broken by someone losing control at 120mph, nice wide sidewalks with trees and flowers alongside...
After: choking with dust and smoke, lots of sidewalks two people can barely walk side by side, dead grass and dusty bushes, reckless drivers, drunk drivers...

Yeah. Better before.

Everything was better before! Now git off mah lawn *shakes walking stick*

Good ads vs Bad ads

[rueger]

It still makes me wonder: how come Google ads just don't irritate me*, and even actually interest me enough to click though on regular basis, but Facebook, Flickr, and everyone else seem to handle advertising in ways that just plain irritate me?

Or that apparently waste advertisers' money because they're flinging ads at people who have utterly no interest in them.

Kind of the same way that I can drop back into Amazon.com after a year or so, and it just feels good and somehow makes it really easy to buy

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 [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."

Re:

[chihowa]

Except Request Policy is funded by the ad networks themselves. Giving the benefit of the doubt, there might be noble intentions behind it...lol, nevermind, I didn't just say that.

Do you have any evidence for that? It seems like RequestPolicy is just some guy [requestpolicy.com] and searching doesn't find any clear documentation of nefarious funding.

Are you thinking of Ghostery, by chance? (Even Ghostery claim that their tracking is opt-in and sold anonymized, though I understand some skepticism there.)

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.

Nothing's free.

[Steve Goldsby]

Figure out what tax you're willing to pay for "free" stuff. The human brain is good at ignoring ads.

No

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Hulu makes me watch 6 30-second commercials several times an hour like normal TV. Haven't done Hulu in a year and a half.

If tumblr does anything besides the occasional in-line ad as part of the tumbling scroll wall, forcing me to stop and watch, bye bye.