We all know that the Internet lives off of advertising – from Google to any free website that wants to make a profit. This is why we shouldn’t be surprised when social/content networks, such as Tumblr, start to include advertising in their mobile services, which is the fastest growing market, but still hasn’t really found a truly effective way to make it profitable.
Tumblr will go with native ads that look just like traditional user posts instead of banner ads. You can even reblog or like them, and the advertising will always be clearly identifiable by a small animated dollar sign. Its a method that could cause controversy – even though it is identifiable, the fact that it has the same design as the rest of the content could cause some confusion.
The company has promised that users won’t see more than four ads per day. This will put Tumblr ahead of a large majority of competitors, and will increase its market share by 65% in the U.S. in this year alone, according to estimates. Tumblr’s growth in the mobile device arena was to be expected due to the constant updates to its app for iOS and Android, and the increase in personal blogs, which has quadrupled its traffic in the last six months.
The creator and CEO of Tumblr, David Karp, said in a recent interview that it wasn’t going to be easy to monetize the network, and that they would do it without breaking the website’s philosophy. “Tumblr is built on atomic elements: blogs and their posts. As long as the advertising doesn’t break that outline, we will be able to inject it without any problems.”
Some of Tumblr’s first advertising partners include ABC, Pepsi, and Warner Bros., which will advertise its upcoming movies on Tumblr, such as The Great Gatsby, and The Hangover 3. If everything goes according to the company’s plans, this will be the first of the six years it’s been online in which it will actually make a profit, just as Lee Brown, its head of global sales, told Bloomberg.
Download Tumblr for Android | http://tumblr.en.uptodown.com/android
Download Tumblr for iOS | http://tumblr.en.uptodown.com/iphone
Official website | http://www.tumblr.com/
