2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
occasionally subtle
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Product Placement
titsay
Mike Driver
The Stonewall Inn
h
izzy's playlists!
noise dept.
pixel skylines
Andulka
EXPECTATIONS
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
oozey mess
KIROKAZE
gracie abrams
@theartofmadeline
Cosimo Galluzzi
seen from Chile
seen from France
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Austria
seen from Sweden
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Côte d’Ivoire
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Lebanon
seen from United States
@greenhorn-teacher
just got asked "sorry, are you a man or a woman?" over the phone and I just said "ahh that's not important right now" but when I got off the phone I went TEEEE HEEE HEEEEE and skipped around. very masculine behaviour. never beating the nonbinary allegations am I
on a similar note, working an office job has me thinking a lot abt the weird dissonance between the projected disembodied identity of the Professional and the reality of a person as like. an oozing sweating animal. like you think abt it enough and the whole building starts to feel like a lot of dogs wearing collared shirts
Let’s fucking GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
also this is so good.
Lately ive been finding myself relating to the dying pig
me when i FUCKING get you *image of two mourning doves cuddling*
getting a lot of comments on the essay about the quality of my voiceover. and I appreciate it, for sure, but is it really that surprising? that a woman who started voice training eight years ago for the purpose of transitioning and has been doing professional voice work for years might be pretty decent at doing a voiceover? watch me do the whole thing again in a Mickey Mouse voice
nobody ever expects me to pull out the Mickey
“i love how we as a fandom have just agreed that–” don’t include me in this. do NOT lump me in with that.
probably speaks to something unwell in the collective tumblr psyche that those absurdly bleak bad luck brian memes are the only survivors of, like, an entire genre of different advice animal image macros.
stolen from prev @fallout-lou-begas 's tags
i do wonder how mamdani would have solved a problem like the green goblin
Exercise does give you more energy in the long run which is so annoying tbh
fun fact about character development by the way. you can make them develop worse.
like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.
they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.
I hate ruminating on what could have been. Out here thinking "if only I locked in when I was 13" are we serious
It never fails to amuse me when I get “hello influencer” emails wanting me to push questionable products to my followers.
Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.
The fuck makes you think I’ll shill your discount wish shit?
Also, it's Tumblr. If I try to tell anyone about your knock-off Wish-quality sex toy there’s going to be a horde of Autistic lesbians doing a power point presentation in the notes about safe sex toy material and correct battery storage.
Which I am 100% down for, but it will not get you any sales.
I was trying to figure out if you were someone important on a other platform, because there's no way in hell anyone actually thinks you can be classified as "Influencer" if you have a big Tumblr blog.
And then also think advertising to this mob would be a good idea
There are actually lots of people who sell stuff successfully on here, usually drop ship stuff.
They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).
And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.
I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.
They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.
It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.
They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.
This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.
It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.
Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.
So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.
But there are also drop-ship sellers on here who get enough of a kick-back from affiliate links to make selling cutesy kitsch stuff worth their time on here. They’re just making sure you don’t know you’re being marketed to.
Throwback to when I openly talked about this and got blocked by several huge “meme” blogs that were actually drop shippers who didn’t like me lifting up the rock and exposing how they hide their ads in plain sight lol
Hey, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, but if you didn’t realize these types of posts/blogs were ads… that’s okay! They are designed to trick you!
These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.
After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?
Turns out, not so much.
Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”
And maybe it was obvious to them.
I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.
But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!
You’re not dumb or silly or worthless or any of the unkind things some people are calling themselves in the notes. You just needed more information. Happily I was able to provide it and now you know what to look for. Go forth and scroll with newfound knowledge 🫡
if you see an injured bird on the ground, give it a knife and train it to fight
ah, the famous ‘batman’ approach to wildlife rehabilitation
