#guess the brand name | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

greater-than-the-sword · 2 years

Text

Op of this blocked me but i thought it was important

So I left out their part of the post but copied everything under it

quote, “

Just saying: Tumblr loses several million of dollars per month. It has been losing millions of dollars per month for ... years. We are not even close of changing that and make this site profitable yet.

And if that doesn't change, you may not believe it, but tumblr will close. Back in 2019, if Automattic hasn't bought it, I'm pretty convinced Verizon would have closed before the end of the year. This time, once Automattic says "we can't keep losing millions per month on this"... I don't think there will be anyone else willing to buy this hellsite, even for a single dollar.

Personally, I would prefer Tumblr to be paid by its own users and not being reliant on advertising. I work here, I could have almost everything for free, but I pay my own blazed posts and crab gifts because of this. But we are FAR from getting enough income from people subscribing, blazing or buying gifts. FAR.

And we are not talking about Facebook-like greed here, "Tumblr wants to squeeze us to make even more money!!!". We are talking about Automattic keeping Tumblr alive for three years already, losing millions and even if doing it costs a significant percentage of the income of the company. And no company would let something like that happens forever.

So if you like tumblr, if you enjoy this boiling cauldron of feral goblins, boicot advertisement if you want, but then toss a coin to your tumblr each month.

GIF by imagine-all-the-things

And it's ok if you can't, but then please, let people, or companies, blaze their posts in peace. If they bother you so much, just install an ad blocker.

But if you are actively trying to make advertisers to flee Tumblr, or bullying people who blaze posts, you are actively working towards the closing of this site. So why don't you just move your shit to TikTok or wherever and stop trying to ruin this place for the rest of us?

Oh I have looked through the notes and holy f-ck, how does some people even function in the outside world?

There are several variations of "we have to keep this site unprofitable!!". And holy shit. Christ on a stake. Forgive my French, but me cago en la puta hostia como se puede ser tan corto.

Repeat with me:

You.Don't.Keep.Any.Site.Unprofitable.

Because if it's unprofitable,

you don't get to keep it for long.

Full stop.

Do you know why Tumblr has stayed around for so long while being unprofitable??

Because it had been run by FOUR DIFFERENT COMPANIES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

So each one of those companies tried to make it profitable for two, three years and failed. And at that point, they just sold it to someone else to try.

The last time, Verizon sold it to Automattic for the business equivalent of a jar of peanut butter and a half-full cola bottle. Because they were going to close it anyway, so better to get that than nothing. And you know why Automattic could get it for cheap? Because. No. One. Else. Offered. Anything. Verizon announced very publicly they were trying to sell it and they got one (1) offer. Because purchasing Tumblr means you are purchasing a thing that puts you several million in debt PER MONTH.

So can you picture, can you imagine, what it will happen if the current owners decide that they can't keep having this thing that costs them so much money per month to maintain?? It has been owned by Automattic for three years already, longer than what it was owned by Yahoo or Verizon. Can you imagine what it would happen if they decide to stop losing money on this thing??

No, there won't be any new owner.

And no, there won't be any fucking tumblr anymore.

akorah

I see your point. The problem is we've seen every single social media site turn into an algorithmic hellscape once they started having major advertisers like this. How can we be confident Tumblr won't do the same? How can we be confident that Tumblr won't get dollar signs in their eyes with these brands escaping Twitter, and start changing the site to accommodate them? We've heard promises before from other social media platforms that things will get 'better' once the money comes in, and we've been betrayed by algorithms and absolutely heinous business practices.

Because the presence of big brands or not is not the symptom of being an algorithmic hellscape or not. Data collection is.

Big brands were advertising on the internet way before the hyper focused ads and data mining became The Way of paying for internet services.

If tumblr starts asking you to fill a profile with your personal info, ask you to connect your contacts, etc, that's the symptom of a turn towards an algorithmic advertising business model. But Tumblr could have done that at any point in the last 10 years and become a money-making machine like the other major social networks. And it didn't happen, for a reason: neither the current management nor the past one wanted to do that and they always have been trying to make Tumblr the platform that manages to succeed while respecting its user's privacy.

You know, I personally don't care about Marvel, but I have gotten blazed posts by Tor books and I was delighted. And if you think about it, marvel blazing its posts is EXACTLY what we want to happen all over the internet. Being realistic, we are not going to make this site to be 100% user funded for a long while, so ads are inevitable. That being the case, what's a better option than the brands sending their ads to everyone, without any segmentation, paying for N impressions and that's it. That was how internet ads were before Google and Facebook became the big brother and started selling our info to advertisers so they could convince your uncle to embrace fascism.

And if Tumblr manages to get to profitability with a mix of "old school ads" and users paying for stuff, we will be demonstrating that there is another way to make a social platform sustainable without it being a facade for a user-data mining gig. But if we boycott every single other way to make money here, not only we would kill Tumblr, but we will also make it the case study proving that privacy invasion and data selling is the one and only way to make money with any social network.

@catfluff

I already wrote about this in another post, but let me do a quick explanation of what's going on here. Before Automattic/tumblr, I used to work in an ad network, so I learned quite a bit about online advertising and how it works.

So…

Why do I get ads that seem to be tailored to me on Tumblr if Tumblr doesn't sell my data 101

So. Most of the ads you see on Tumblr are not really something a company contacts Tumblr directly to put in here. There's is this thing that's called "ad exchanges" that is where a big chunk of internet advertising comes from. Basically, when you have an app, or a site, and want to put advertising on it, you reach a deal with one, or usually several, of those ad exchanges to 'sell' your ad space through them.

Basically, they are like ebay, but for ad space and only used by computers. When you are browsing tumblr and the app decides that is time to show you an ad, what it does is pinging one of these ad exchanges telling it "hey, I have space for an ad of these characteristics (size, format, etc)". Then the ad exchange put the space 'on sale', all the potential advertisers bid for it, and the one with the higher bid sends the ad you are going to be shown. All this bidding happens in milliseconds, so there are a lot of folks like me who work on making computers smart enough to win those bids over other competing advertisers, etc.

The thing is that when you are one of the services that are bidding for that ad space, you get some data from the ad exchange so you can tell if you want to bid or not. The most basic info, the one you get from apps that don't really share personal info, is just things like the ip address, the advertising id from your phone, maybe your general geographic area (mostly, your country), the languages your browser or your phone accepts. Then, if the app is doing some spying on you, you may get some extra data: Your gender, your age, all kinds of "profile" info advertisers can use to decide if they want to bid for that ad space or not.

Now, the advertisers are continuously getting this info and there's really no way to tell them what to do with it. And they are smart enough to not just let it waste. Every time they get one of those ad opportunities, they store the data, even if they don't win the bid. And then… they can do things with that data.

Imagine you use, for example, an app that's mining your data and selling it to advertisers through an ad exchange. The advertiser gets the opportunity to show you an ad, and whether they bid or not, they store the data they get. Your ip, your ids, the profiling data the app is sending to them, everything.

Now, you close the crappy spying app and decide to spend some time browsing this hellsite. Tumblr also wants to show you an ad, so it sends the request to the ad exchange with the minimum information possible: your ip, your phone unique id, your language. The advertiser gets pinged to be told about this chance to show you an ad, but they can't profile you, so it's not particularly interesting. Unless… oh yeah, they have a record from 10 minutes ago that matches your ip! And in that record, they have that you are in Calatayud, Spain, that you are a woman between 25 and 30 years, and that you like dogs. So … yeah, they decide to bid for the tumblr ad, and send you an ad based on the information about you they have recorded. Bam. You get an ad about a pet shop next to your street and you go "WTF, tumblr is selling my data!". Fair, but not really what happened.

The best example of this is when you travel internationally. Let's say you are in Germany, and your phone is full of german-language ads. But you turn it off and take a plane to Portugal. When you land, you turn your phone on again, and, for a while, you are still getting german ads all over. Why? Because the advertisers stored your phone id back when you still were in Germany, so if they are sending you an ad in an app that's not really sharing much about you, they are just checking you up in their databases. And it will take a while for them to get enough information about you for telling that you are now in Portugal and adjust the ads they serve to you.

How is this even legal?!?!? well, if you are in the US … mostly everything is legal there. If you are in the UE, they are technically not storing any personal information about you (because IPs or phone ids aren't considered personal info), so there is no link to your name anywhere, they are ok to store all that data about you (if you ask me, that's A HELL of a technicality). Everywhere else, I really don't know the legal framework to talk about it.

So… yeah. That's it. That's the thing. That's how an advertiser can profile you even on tumblr, even if tumblr doesn't tell them much about you to them.

deactivated-662bce

One correction: IP address is protected personal information under GDPR.

But yeah, tl;dr

tumblr costs millions to operate and is not profitable

3rd parties WILL harvest your data wherever you go, whether it's legal or not (something something Cambridge Analytica)

use Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, Ghostery, some Ad Block, VPN, whatever

enabled Do Not Track in your browser and phone

reset your phone's Advertiser ID every couple of weeks anyway

also remember that an INSANE amount of information you share (and even which don't share!) on facebook, youtube, instagram, google, tiktok, etc all get scraped, processed, and sold to third parties

even if you never say "I like cats" on facebook, but interact with a lot of cat photos, facebook WILL KNOW THAT YOU LIKE CATS, and WILL SELL THIS INFORMATION. Tumblr doesn't - but if your blog is public, anyone can scrape it and derive this information themselves.

by default FACEBOOK FOLLOWS YOU on every site that has the cursed Like button, fb comment section, or similar widgets! Disqus, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, all similar embedded widgets harvest your data as well!

TIKTOK READS WHAT YOU TYPE INTO OTHER APPS, UNINSTALL THAT SPYWARE JUNK RIGHT NOW

you joke that "your FBI agent this or that" but NSA genuinely has tons of information and a psychological profile on every single one of you, whether it's obtained legally or (most often) not. They know if you're a climate activist. They know if you joke about blowing up . You Are On A List.

"Over 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency". [source]" <- this was in 1976, long before Internet, what do you think they have now?

do not blame Tumblr for trying to survive financially

pay for ad-free tumblr, $40 a year is very likely less money than facebook+insta+tiktok+youtube+reddit makes off of you every year

this is not a hellsite, this is a hellworld, and Tumblr (the company; not your blog as such) is somehow the smallest privacy concern that you can possibly have (today)

#long post #important #just get ad free #no one is forcing you to interact with the brands i guess #if they ever start demanding people connect their contacts and fill out a profile with real name etc this website is over anyway

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