Oh, The Places Tumblr Can Go

Nothing says Internet opportunity like a social media juggernaut. Tumblr, the meme-olicious, gif-tastic, photo-fabulous, (but also occasionally) thoughtful?blogging platform that attracted 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews in December,?is certainly no exception. The site now ranks as the 11th-largest in terms of traffic, according to Quantcast. (That?s down slightly from November, when it broke into the top 10 with 170 million monthly visitors globally.) But with all that activity comes the inevitable question: What next? Here?s a look at five areas where Tumblr has moved, and may move more toward, in the year ahead. Advertising.?Tumblr is very much one of the social media startups that was built for scale first, revenue later. And it?s been wildly successful with the former, bringing over 17.8 billion pageviews in December worldwide across its network of 80 million+ blogs. But in 2012, the company got a little more serious on the latter point and introduced a new revenue stream based around ads – not straight display ads but “sponsor products” that promote Tumblr blogs based on brands or specific events. Given that the company?s founder and CEO David Karp has made it clear he?s not a big fan of ads, it seems as if this were meant to counterbalance in-stream ads like Twitter?s Promoted Tweets or Facebook?s Sponsored Stories.?(Update: a good Forbes profile of Karp, published after I posted this story, points out that the company had revenues of $13 million in 2012 and targets $100 million in sales in 2013, from the sales of these new ads.) Tumblr places the sponsored products out of the stream on actual pages, only suggesting them at a time when users are searching for interesting content promoted through Tumblr?s Spotlight pages and its Radar of randomized, buzzy images. An example Spotlight post is below, with a little dollar sign to signify that they’re not editorially selected or organically generated: All fine and well, but earlier today, I got to wondering just how successful these ads are, or how much Tumblr is actually pushing them. Flicking through all of the Tumblr spotlights, I saw a total of six advertisers (seven if you count the two different ads for Standard Hotels). And these were by no means spread across all of Tumblr?s 50+ spotlight categories. And through many, many refreshes on different pages, I actually never managed to catch a single Radar ad. In short, in-your-face ads

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