Was going to write this as a reply to something but realized it needed its own post.
The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.
I work for a marketing company. I build websites.
Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.
The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.
Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.
Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.
Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:
This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...
As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:
The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.
THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.
It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.
(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)
All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.
Tumblr is one of the last true social medias we have; a place where content is made purely for the sake of talking about it. But given the writing on the wall...I doubt it'll stay that way.
"Just get an ad-blocker."
My sweet summer children, the issue is not whether you see Blazed content or not. It's about Tumblr becoming a marketing media platform, which will give you a completely different and far less fulfilling user experience than a social media one does.
Everything Tumblr's current userbase loves about Tumblr has to do with the fact it provides real human connection. People make jokes, goof around, have meaningful conversations, read crazy tales from other people's lives, and form oddball holidays about Caesar getting stabbed. You see content you opt into seeing and don't see content you haven't, and any content that becomes popular does so because it's interesting, not because you managed to hit the jackpot on the algorithm slot machine.
You know what Tumblr has? Culture. Tumblr is one of the very few websites where a public-facing culture grows organically out of human interaction. I get to see people being people rather than the idea of being people.
But this will all gradually dissolve as Automattic adds more features on Tumblr that cater to the needs of businesses. Why? Because the marketing needs of businesses and the social needs of people are inherently incompatible. You can't have a hybrid marketing-social media website without it being kind of shitty at both, and "being kind of shitty at conversions" is not what gets businesses to shell out for your ad services.
I've love to be wrong, by the way.
It's possible this is why we're seeing so many different avenues of revenue from Tumblr; it's an attempt to try to retain this site's culture while providing some kind of competitive edge in the (critically out-of-control) advertisement market. (There's literally too much content out there to make SEO work for everyone and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.)
But whether it's to keep Tumblr afloat in the chaos, or to smokescreen some larger commercialization of Tumblr, it looks bad. And as someone who loves this website and hates advertisements, I'm upset about it.
You know what I just noticed? That Blaze campaign page advises you to “pick the right audience”. Which is a bit odd to say the least given that one of the selling points of Blaze is that you can’t pick an audience. Blaze posts are shown to completely random people because, at least at the moment, tumblr doesn’t collect enough user data to allow tailored advertising. I remember this being celebrated by Internet privacy advocates when Blaze first came out. It seemed like a way that tumblr could make money while remaining ethical about user privacy.
I have a bad feeling about this.
i mean... yeah, this.
like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)
but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!
the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.
and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.
do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.
it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.
look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.
and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.
does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!
but this is unfortunately the world we live in right now. and to keep holding on to our little corner of the internet, where we can stay weird and blog like it's 2010 and default to seeing chronological posts from people we have personally selected to follow, i am willing to accept certain concessions.
we're trying!
In the before times (before blaze, before tumblr live), when tumblr still wasn't supposed to know anything about us for marketing, I noticed something weird. I'd signed up on the Bumble dating app. My tumblr ads became "meet singles in [my city]!" and the ad would be a man about my age. I switched my Bumble preferences to women, and my tumblr ads now put a woman's picture in the ad. I dunno. Tumblr was already talking to Bumble about my location, age and dating preferences. When I deleted Bumble, my tumblr ads went back to being random.
Now I pay for ad-free, but I'm kinda skeptical of the claim that tumblr has never targeted ads, because my Bumble dating era a couple years ago produced some creepily targeted tumblr ads.
Ok, I didn't want to enter into this thread because I keep repeating the same thing over and over every three weeks, but here we go again.
So. Tumblr, like most of the sites that are not big enough to have their own ad platform, uses what is called programmatic ads. This means that it's integrated with some services called "Ad exchanges" that are the ones providing the ads.
How it works is something like this: you are browsing Tumblr in your phone and the app decides it is time to show you an ad. Tumblr then pings these ad exchanges, and tell them "I have ad space for [information about you Tumblr shares with the ad exchange]. Then the ad exchange pings everyone who is trying to run an ad campaign (ad networks) and tells them "we have a space for an ad, this is the information" and creates an auction, where depending on that info Tumblr has shared, every ad network bids a tiny amount of money or not. The one with the higher bid gets the deal and send your Tumblr app the ad you are going to see.
This entire thing happens in milliseconds. That's why it is called "programmatic", because all the decisions are not taken by humans, but by computer servers that need to be programmed to know when to bid for ad space and when to skip.
That's the basics of how a big chunk of the ad industry works on internet. Now, what does Tumblr share with the ad exchange about you?
The. Bare. Minimum.
That includes the advertising id of your phone. (Think about it like the license plate of your phone). The language of your app and the country you are in. If you are using Android or iPhone. Honestly, little else.
You know what? WE DON'T EVEN HAVE MUCH MORE INFO ABOUT YOU. I have access to the tools, I can see what we know. We know what you do on Tumblr, obviously. We know your email. AND THAT'S IT. Fuck, we don't even know the gender of the people. We don't know your age. We don't know shit.
And you know? that's good. But all that info we don't know is also what it makes the advertisers interested, because the most info you give them, the most they can segment you and show you an ad they think it's going to be more effective with you.
So yeah, they are going to pay much, much more for ad space if they know the gender, the age, the education level, the exact location, etc of the person who is going to see that ad. If they don't get that? Meh, they may get the chance anyway and send you an ad blindly, but just is it's dirty cheap.
And that's, friends, is why other social media platforms are a money printing machines and Tumblr is struggling heavily to even survive.
But Javi, I've seen ads that looked tailored to me, I even did some testing and I confirmed they were!!
Ok, first of all, let me clear things. What I'm going to explain now is not speculation. Before working for Automattic, I spent three years working for an ad network. I've seen this. I've done this. I can't tell you that every ad network, or agency, does this, but I can tell you it's sure as hell some do. Again, this is not speculation, it's industry standards:
You see personalized ads on Tumblr because they are personalized. But not because we share info about you.
You remember some paragraphs ago I told you Tumblr share your phone ad id, right? That's literally the minimum information required to be able to show you ads. It doesn't really tell anything about you on its own, BUT.
Imagine you are an ad network. Your job is to serve ads and try to make people click on them. For that, you want as much data about that people as you could have, so you can get "smart" about it. Let's say you get a ping from an ad exchange telling you there is this ad opportunity for a phone and it comes from a shitty app that shares a lot of personal information.
You may want to bid for that ad space or not. You may win the bid and serve the ad or not. But do you know what you do no matter what?
You store the data you got from the ad exchange. You store that for the phone whose id is X, at this particular moment in time, it was being used by a person of these characteristics.
Then, a few minutes after that, you get another ad opportunity to bid for. Oh, it's from Tumblr, those assholes don't share any data we can use to segment the user, let's skip and not bid for this ad. No, wait, let's check the phone ad id in our database. Oh. Oh, we have a lot of data from a few minutes ago for this phone id "X". It doesn't matter that Tumblr hasn't given us shit, other app did for this same phone, so we can use that other app info to segment you and send you a personalised ad. And do it for cheap, since very few of our competitors would be interested in paying for this ad space that doesn't include any segmentable personal info. Muohohoho, excellent [more evil laugh]
So yeah, it's shady as fuck. But the moment you put any personal info on an app that shares it with advertisers, the moment those advertisers can cross-check to use it when other apps that respect your privacy want to show you a generic, non-personalized ad.
Once again, this is not speculation: from 2012 to 2015 I worked on a company that used to do exactly as I've just described.
So no. Tumblr is not tracking you in secret, nor sharing any info about you beyond the most absolutely basic stuff. But that's far from enough to assure you are not going to see personalized ads on Tumblr.
