Tumblr Is Now Using the Saddest Kind of Online Advertising

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Sam Biddle

12/27/13 04:32PM

Filed to: tumblr

In July, Tumblr's tween creator David Karp predicted native, multimedia advertising would be the most exciting, dazzling part of the company. At the year's end, they're running depressing link ads for the yellow pages.

It wasn't supposed to be this way—text ads like those above, which Unwrapping Tumblr noticed now show up when you search for keywords, are perhaps the least valuable, least desirable form of online advertising out there. In other words, if Tumblr's sponsored GIF factory were making money like Davey expected, these wouldn't be there. This is filler.

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CpnSisko Sam Biddle 12/27/13 04:36PM

Advertising has always been one of the least efficient revenue models. There's a saying in business, that the only reason people advertise at all is because there's no alternative.

As more and more of these worthless companies enter the fray, the less valuable the ads themselves become.

Lars Sam Biddle 12/27/13 11:11PM

Honestly, this reminds me of the garbage that is advertised on Facebook all the fucking time, and that apparently scales pretty well. Maybe Tumblr will at least break even on for Yahoo!.

anthony87davids Sam Biddle 12/27/13 05:07PM

Oh come on now guys, parent Yahoo is letting advertisers still advertise "belly fat" ads ON THE FRONT PAGE using fake news websites that the FTC banned a long time ago. Here's one from December 25th that points to "womenshealthmag-topstories.com" which appears to have been taken down since then. Yay!

tumby Sam Biddle 12/27/13 05:14PM

See this post from three weeks ago about an even worse example of the "little blue links" that Karp carped about.

http://tumbyland.tumblr.com/post/691694801…