Yahoo announced few weeks ago that it is buying Tumblr and now it seems that changes are already underway. This change comes to a jump in the ad business of Tumblr.
It is being said that in about a month, Tumblr will begin to roll out sponsored web posts. They’ll be integrated into the users streams, which if you are a user of Facebook and have seen the ads appearing in your news feed, then you know what I’m talking about.
It really was an inevitable move on their part, but I am positive that this will stir up the already worried Tumblr users. Ever since Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr, devout users have been worried that their site is going to ruins, because of commercialization. This is coming a month after there was ads introduced into the mobile user’s stream, but now with this update it seems desktop users will not be able to escape it any better.
Tumblr accumulated $13 million in ad revenue last year and that was before the inclusion of in-stream ads. With the addition of Yahoo’s sales force, it is anticipated that ad revenue with increase dramatically as time goes on. Yahoo has about 25,000 sale people compared to the 25 at Tumblr. It is also being said that Yahoo will introduce native ad formats to Tumblr.
There are seven businesses so far that have been testing the web ads in beta. Those companies are Purina, Denny’s, Universal Pictures, Viacom, For Motor Company, AT&T, and Capital One. Desktop users will see up to four posts a day, much like the mobile versions of the ad placement.
There are about 93 million loyal users at Tumblr and it is reported that more than half of loyal users use desktop and mobile versions of the site.
So, with that high amount of users, it is expected that the price of ads are not going to be cheap. It seems that Yahoo is finally making that turn around that they have been dying for in the past years.