so yeah I subscribed to tumblr as a direct result of working in advertising. specifically, I work in paid media and digital placement on social media, which gives me an intimate look into how much data the vast majority of social media companies mine from every single user every single moment of the day.
spoiler alert: it’s a lot, and it’s not just limited to Facebook, or Google, or whatever. it’s omnipresent. it’s constantly sold and resold. yesterday I had lunch with a company that places dynamic ads in email newsletters, which is to say that if you sign up for the NYT newsletter, those little banner ads will change depending on who signed up, where you are, time of day, etc. their information, he happily told me, comes from a proprietary bundle they buy from several sources and is 96% a correct match. this is the industry standard, to be clear. every single social media platform is currently attempting to race to find a more intrusive and more powerful and more optimized “algorithm” to determine how to deliver ads directly to your cerebellum, and vast amounts of capital are being funneled into that, absolutely everywhere. except, somehow, tumblr.
this is not to say tumblr is virtuous for not monetizing its user base - from what I understand, the code is just too janky and weird to ever actually be able to do that. however, it does mean (extremely accidentally and unintentionally) that it’s managed to remain basically one of the few remaining social sites where you are able so be relatively private, and anonymous, should you so choose. ever wonder why the site seems to attract so many queer, neurodivergent folk? the lack of any real ability to track its user base is one of the most important selling points of this platform for new and existing users, either implicitly or explicitly. but it is also the single greatest obstacle to its longevity and continued survival in this form.
there’s a saying in the internet of things: if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. free things tend to last on the internet only if they have investor money, and only as long as it takes to start squeezing out revenue either from their users, or their advertisers. (I’d argue, for instance, that as an advertiser I’m more a “user” of Facebook than your grandparents who log on every day are. your grandparents are my captives, or at least my potential resources.) the fact that tumblr can’t seem to deliver ads is in fact an endorsement, oddly - the moment you start regularly seeing useful ads is the moment someone has figured out a way to connect your identity to your blog. and once that happens - once that revenue stream becomes actually viable - it becomes extremely difficult to put that particular demon back into the box. once that happens, it’s a pretty clear (and infinitely replicable) path to seeing a social media platform become completely unusable. (for a real time example of this, watch Twitter attempting to do the same monetization experiment on a vaster scale - with actual users leaving, advertisers following suit, and the whole platform essentially seeming 1-2 years away from shuttering entirely.
so yeah, I’m spending money on my tumblr. I spend a few hours on this dumb hellsite (complimentary), and it seems worth it to me to literally vote with my dollars to make sure a strategic manager somewhere has more ammunition to make the case that maybe going into next quarter they should prioritize user experience over intrusive monetization and tracking (because believe you me those discussions are happening every day). this is not an endorsement of tumblr itself as it exists - with its bots, its transphobic moderations, its fundamental jankiness. it is instead an endorsement that I’d rather choose to pay a bit more and invest in a space that I spend a lot of my time in, than have it Twittered and Facebooked into the trash. it’s a vote that users and their experiences should have a stake in the future of this platform and be prioritized, instead of being harvested for data. i like this corner I’ve built here. I know it can’t stay free forever. so I’d rather pay a cost that I can see.
