We’re experiencing an issue with Blaze ad campaigns that’s preventing accurate progress reporting in the Blaze interface, causing it to always show 0 impressions served, even though we are serving the Blazed post to other users. We’re going to hide the progress reports for now, and bring it back when the issue is resolved, but this may take a day or two. Users who are using Blaze will still receive accurate final wrap-up reports, only the progress reporting is broken currently. We’ll report back here when the issue is resolved!
The option to “Show Blaze posts” has been added to Ad-Free Browsing, by popular demand.
We’ve updated the default Tumblr Official blog theme to be compatible with Microformats 2, which allows blogs using the Official theme to be parsed more easily as part of the IndieWeb. Follow the ongoing work on this here!
We’ve added a new experimental “Popular Reblogs” tab to Tumblr Labs in the mobile apps. Check it out by going to General Settings in the mobile apps, then scrolling down to Labs.
We’re running an experiment on web where we’re swapping out “Recommended blogs” on the top right of the dashboard with a list of your followed tags. Let us know what you think!
Fixed
On web, we’re fixing bugs and making tweaks to the Blaze post popup.
We’re making performance improvements to many aspects of Explore on all platforms to decrease load time.
Ongoing
We’re aware that the Tumblr iOS app is unavailable for download in South Korea. We’re working to bring it back.
Upcoming
We’re working to bring back the official Tumblr browser extension to Chrome and Firefox.
Experiencing an issue?File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
i think absolutely the funniest thing about like, the adfree tumblr subscription coming with the option to turn ads back on anyway so you can see the weird ad everyone is talking about, or the new promoted post feature and everyone immediately thinking about what kind of stupid shit to put on other people’s dashboards. is that for years execs have been struggling for a way to make tumblr profitable when its userbase is so actively hostile to being advertised to and thus extremely unattractive to the big advertisers that keep the majority of other sites afloat, and have been passing tumblr around from company to company like a hot potato as a result. and now the solution is to like. only allow the stupidest most insane ineffective advertisements and then give users the tools to make even more insane and ineffective advertisements. i just really like that this site is so impossible to advertise to that they just kinda gave up on doing it the conventional way and are now letting us prop up the empty defaced husk of advertisement and parade it around for our amusement. i also really like that this is a perfectly double edged sword because the more people see your post the more attention you get and everyone knows attention is a punishment on tumblr dot com. i love it here i’m never gonna leave
It’s so fitting that the “lock your posts behind a paywall” Tumblr feature was universally panned while the “force total strangers to see your shitposts” feature is celebrated
No one wants things withheld from them. But people will fight to have the ability to live the “I had to see this, now you all have to as well” quote. Why suffer alone when you can drag people down with you? Now THAT is a feature.
Gretchen:hey we should use tumblr blaze to tell people an interesting thing about linguistics!
Lauren: but, um, we don’t do ads?
Gretchen:this is different, people are using it to promote like, photos of their pets, it’s cute!
Lauren:okay, so what should we tell them?
Gretchen:we could link to a photo of our producer…
Lauren:we’re an audio podcast, people are going to be disappointed if they start out expecting to get cat pics all the time
Gretchen:okay true. hm.
Lauren: linguistics facts wouldn’t be misleading though
Gretchen:WAIT
Gretchen: I’ve got it
Lauren:what
Gretchen: the Eeyore thing
Lauren: the Eeyore thing?
Gretchen:okay, so you know how the secondary animals in Winnie the Pooh all have really obvious names? Like, there’s a rabbit named Rabbit, an owl named Owl, a piglet named Piglet, two kangaroos called Kanga and Roo. And then there’s Eeyore
Lauren: who also has an obvious name
Gretchen: yeah, obvious to you and A. A. Milne, who both have non-rhotic accents! I was a full adult when I learned that Eeyore was just the sound a donkey makes, like it’s the British spelling of “hee-haw”
Lauren:and Australian! I have always known this
Gretchen: not for me! I still remember exactly where I was when I found out, I just spent the next five minutes saying “Eeyore” to myself in a British accent
Lauren: so, just so we’re clear, your plan is to spend $10 in the hope that a few randomly selected people scrolling through tumblr will pause and say “Eeyore” at the screen with and without the R?
What I’m about to say might sound harsh but if you are considering blazing your fanwork or otherwise niche content I need you to understand that a lot of people will not care and don’t want to see it. Throwing it in front of random people isn’t going to do much besides bring negative attention toward you, especially depending on what it is you make. Understand that the problem is not merely getting eyes on your work, but getting the right eyes on it. And that is not going to be achieved well with tumblr blaze.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW DIFFERENT THIS IS??? because as someone who works in digital marketing, my jaw literally dropped.
When I put out an ad for a client on Facebook, I can target like… new moms in their 30s who are looking for furniture within a 10-mile radius. Or people who have an anniversary coming up. People who have just moved. People who are in a new relationship. People who have elementary school kids and tend to vote Republican. People who have liked certain Pages. It’s absolutely unnerving.
the utter chaos of this, though.
it’s just… incredible.
Honestly though, as someone myself who works in infosec and data privacy, what this suggests to me is that Tumblr either doesn’t have, or isn’t willing / able to use, that detailed targeting information about its users. Which is great!! Every other company out there - not just social media companies but everything from your grocery store to your car insurance company to your operating system provider - actively collects as much demographic data as it can about its users specifically for this kind of ad targeting purposes.
Obviously Tumblr still collects some data and uses it for ad targeting; they do have this in their Privacy settings:
But the fact that they’re either unable, or are choosing not, to make that data available to people buying Blaze posts is such a huge win for data protection and a giant thumbing of the nose to the FAANGs who believe that the only way to make ad revenue work is to make ads as targeted as possible.
I can’t express how much I hope Blaze succeeds with this insane and chaotic model. XD
I adore how much power Blaze gives me as a consumer of posts.
My beloved moot posts a bad take, I will gently bring up in the comments or a DM what I thought of it.
But a Blaze post i don’t like? Nothing for you. No interaction. You paid real human money for me to see this and in return I will not give you a like, reblog, or comment.
Meanwhile I’m giving this grand gesture with my hand like an irritated tyrant, sending this wandering jester to the oubliette. Go be forgotten, fool. Fucking starve.
also i think it’s funny how tumblr was like “you can pay to see someone’s posts” and we were all like FUCK you and they were like “… pay to… inflict your own posts… on others?” and we were like
yknow, people talk about the tumblr userbase being reclusive and stubborn (and we are), but its worth noting that we’re also aggressively social.
we dont NEED algorithms, because thats OUR job, and we take pride in it. we WANT to do the work ourselves! we WANT to tell people ourselves!
we dont NEED our blogs to look the same, because we wanna make our OWN themes, and share them with each other, and experiment!
our most successful april fools days are the ones that just gave us new avenues to SCREAM REALLY LOUDLY in (promoting candidates in the 2016 election, turning our dashboards into semi-randomized rube goldberg machines of text and emojis in 2022).
we’re always constantly ramping things up to eleven, so the best enrichment toy for us is just. see this ball? feel free to throw it as hard as you want.
> we’re also aggressively social
oh. I just realised.
this is what actual social media is. instead of the other websites, which are advertising media that pretend they’re social media.
This exactly what I mean when I distinguish between Marketing Media and Social Media.
It’s happened! The first Blaze post has haunted my dash, and it’s the fucking 95 theses.
When I say hellsite (affectionate) this wasn’t the context I was thinking
you wanna know something even funnier? the metrics report i got on the post at the end of the weekend showed absolutely garbageengagement. the post that inspired me to do it got thousands of notes. the post where i said i was going to do it got several hundred as my followers and mutuals cheered me on.
the post i paid an entire crisp and refreshing hamilton for got blasted out to more than 13 thousand dashboards… and then netted exactly 92 reblogs, because it’s a genuinely awful post and no one sane wanted to touch it. it’s a total flop… except this is like the fourth or fifth post i’ve seen about it.
ALT
