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Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

Of the 10,600+ brands we examine on a daily basis (see optimalsocial.com/portfolios for more on these across 100 sectors), we see about 2,400 (just less than 25%) have a tumblr presence.

25% of these are mostly empty and many appear to be brands squatting on their own names and planning to get to it later when they have time, perhaps. About 588 of these brand pages have fewer than 10 items of lifetime activity. Some brands like Pepsi are quite active, though the activity levels ebb and flow quite a bit, but others are far less so. The mean number of total engagements per brand on tumblr is 224 but the median is just two. Tumblr hasn’t yet figured out how to get users to engage with brands, yet, and it doesn’t seem that users are falling over themselves to engage with brands.

Tumblr’s content distribution model still needs to be sorted out, in order for brands to truly achieve viral distribution and authentic connections with consumers

the company's ad units are so new. But Tumblr faces other obstacles as well including an ambivalence towards advertising, a lack of metrics and a platform that lets you do lots of marketing outreach for free.

Tumblr's huge reach — the platform claims 18 billion pageviews a month — the ads only brought in $13 million or possibly even less last year.

advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.

The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.

Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.

Tumblr is letting brands buy their way into the list of what's trending on the platform's mobile product.  The Yahoo-owned social blogging site said today that it would sell Sponsored Trending Blog placements to brands looking to post messages via Tumblr's mobile app. The new ad format is Tumblr’s second on mobile and fifth advertising product overall

Though Facebook is still the most popular social network among teens, their enthusiasm for Mark Zuckerberg's network is decreasing, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center. Pew reports that 77% of online teens (ages 12-17) surveyed use Facebook. But while Pew's findings show that teens view Facebook participation as important for socializing, they have "waning enthusiasm for Facebook," as explained in the video above. The report cites teens' dislike for over-sharing and stressful "drama" on the social network. Teens also don't like the fact that more and more adults are joining Facebook, although Pew found that 7 in 10 teens are Facebook friends with their parents.

Pew found 24% of online teens use Twitter, an increase from 16% in 2011

Outside of Twitter and Facebook, teens don't have as much of an online presence. In 2012, 11% of teen social media users used Instagram, while Tumblr (5%), Google+ (3%) and Pinterest (1%) drew in even fewer teens.

what is native advertising? A quick, simple definition: It's an ad whose form and delivery is identical to the content environment in which it is served. The opposite, in other words, of interruptive advertising: billboards, takeovers, and big banners that take up space on the page but don't otherwise relate.

Native advertising is not without its controversies. A big one is the learning curve: Marketers must master each potential advertising environment and learn its intricacies, from Tumblr users' love for animated GIFs and the phrase "fuck yeah," to Twitter's peculiar language of retweets and replies to Facebook's maddening algorithms.

Digg sent 1.4 million referrals to publishers in February 2013, compared with 75,000 referrals in February 2012.

While Digg remains behind both StumbleUpon and Fark, which sent between 2 and 3 million referrals to publishers in February, it's growing while these platforms are not. And to put the referral numbers in additional context, Digg is now on par with Tumblr, a platform with more than 100 million users, in terms of referral traffic. Tumblr sent 1.3 million referrals to network publishers in February.

there’s a flaw in the “app for everything” ideology: now every single website these days wants to be an app. This is a bad because… Not everything needs to be an app If every site has an app, app stores will just end up like worse versions of the Internet (poor discovery, gatekeepers, etc.) Apps are high-friction (require more bandwidth, passwords, etc)

According to GWI, mobile access to social media sites actually overtook traditional PC access in Q4 of 2013, as 66 percent of users accessed their social networks by mobile compared to 64 percent by computer. However, microblogging sites — which include Twitter and Tumblr — are apparently best reserved for the tablet, dominating over both traditional computers and mobile for usage.

No matter what the device, Facebook remains top dog across the board overall – account ownership, active usage and visit frequency, across all regions — although it has seen minor decline as other social networks gain mindshare. The key winner in this year’s new class of social networks is Instagram: A nearly 25% rise in active users betwen Q2 and Q4 of 2013 bring the estimated total of active users on the website to more than 90 million. It’s also popular for the kids, too, as teens represent the dominant demographic on the site, with a 39 percent share of active users. According to GWI, the only other social networks that can boast teens as their dominant users are Youtube and Tumblr.

GWI’s data only indicates that Facebook’s teens shrank two percentage points, leaving a rough user estimate of 34.19 million

"We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens," Facebook CFO David Ebersman said

Facebook may be feeling the burn of alternative social sites like Tumblr and Snapchat that skew towards a younger demographic. But there is a glimmer of hope, Ebersman said: "We remain close to fully penetrated among teens in the U.S."

While the teen embrace of Facebook might be slackening, its Instagram unit has no trouble attracting a younger audience, with teen users rising five percent this year.

Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.

with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.

“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”