{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021. Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/692019123448922112/", "html": "

pressanykeytostart:

biglawbear:

phantomrose96:

\"image\"

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my\u00a0\u201chow much to tip movers\u201d query before I\u2019ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don\u2019t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I\u2019m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don\u2019t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr\u2019s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller.\u00a0

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

\u201cPour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.\u201d

\u201cPut it in the garbage, fuck you.\u201d

\u201cYour wife says you\u2019re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.\u201d

That\u2019s it. That\u2019s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine\u00a0ineptitude. I don\u2019t want your money. I don\u2019t want anything from you. Fuck you.\u00a0

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

\n\n\n

I started screenshotting my favorite ads

Just fucking take a bite out of your soap you piece of shit. Sleep with it and eat it

I don\u2019t even know what this is trying to sell me. Tumblr doesn\u2019t either. The ad doesn\u2019t know either. Did I click on the link? Fucking absolutely. I think it was broken

Beautiful a+ 10/10

\n

Ok, so before working on Tumblr, even before working for Automattic, I worked for the empire an ad network. We were the middle men that took money for advertisers and bought ad space from apps and sites to place their ads. What you need to understand is this is a totally automated process. Sites like this don\u2019t sell space to every advertiser individually. They use another layer of middlemen called \u201cad exchanges\u201d. Think about them like eBay for ads, but where the users are just computers.

Long story short, it works like this:

  1. An advertiser (let\u2019s say, Cornetto) wants to show some ads (of ice cream!) on the web, so they book an ad network for some cash.
  2. The ad network goes to an ad exchange and tell them \u201chey, we need to print 50k Cornetto Soft ads, with this format, can you tell me when you have some space, please?
  3. You are just chilling with your Tumblr app, which decides it\u2019s time to show you an ad. So the app pings the ad exchange and tells them: \u201chey, we have one spot for an ad of this size\u201d
  4. The ad exchange sends the info to all the ad networks who were interested on this type of ads, and every one of them sends a bid and the ad to print. The bigger bidder gets the spot and prints their ad on your app.

Now, the price for those ad spaces increases exponentially when they include segmentation info. So the bare minimum you get for an ad space is something like \u201ca space of this size, in this app/site, for a system using this language\u201d. From there, a lot of crap about you can be added: with the exception of your name, everything else is fair game: where you are, which sites you have seen, your age, your gender, your friends, the apps you have installed\u2026 Facebook options are like a fucked up catalog of human behaviors you can micro-target your ads towards. Of course, if you are advertising something, it\u2019s much more valuable for you an ad spot that can tell you is going to be seen by someone you think is the target of the campaign. So including personal info can make an ad easily 100x or 1000x more expensive.

Everything described happens, literally, in milliseconds, so no human intervention is possible, everything is programmed by folks like me. Folks like me that need to test what they are doing to make sure it actually works in a real life environment.

So we used to have some small real money budget to test things worked as expected. Basically you put a test ad, program it to bid the minimum amount possible (you don\u2019t want to waste your budget and you can get impressions for something as low as 0.001\u20ac if you don\u2019t mind to get the spaces no one wants) and then open an app you know is using the same ad exchange you are using, and start to doomscroll until you get to see your testing ad showing up in the app. Until you get to see it and stop the automatic bidding, another few hundred or thousand totally unrelated folks would have seen it too. And it would have cost your company maybe 0.1\u20ac.

Since this is dirt cheap, you launch literally shitposts as an ad. My testing ad to go was a picture of a pony with a button that said \u201cRide now!\u201d and a link to google.com. if you have seen an ad like that between 2013 to 2015, that\u2019s on me, you are welcome.

Now, of course, the cheaper the ad space, the bigger the chance to get a testing ad from a bored chap that just needs to test the ads their company sells will still be shown after whatever chances they have just done.

So what happens if you have a (hell)site that generates A LOT of traffic, a lot of empty ad spaces, but shares no premium \u201cpersonal info\u201d segmentation data? The cost of those spaces is going to be the bare bottom, and since there are so many of them, every bid will probably have very few bidders and the price won\u2019t go up. So\u2026 Testing shitpost galore!

So every time you see a weird ad on Tumblr, especially when they have broken links or the like\u2026 You are seeing a live proof that Tumblr is not selling any info about you (and we are getting almost nothing for every ad we show)

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