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Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide

Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

it could also be because Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s not a big picture study here – just a slice.

how exactly does Yahoo plan on stealing away YouTube's video creators? Easy: It will appeal to those that rely on their videos for income, and pay them better.

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.

Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.

In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?

Market-research outfit eMarketer projected that Facebook will account for 21.7 percent of the global mobile ad market in 2014, up from 17.5 percent in 2013 and just 5.4 percent in 2012. Google still commands the lion’s share of the sector, with eMarketer pegging it for a 46.8 percent share in 2014, and attributing its drop from nearly 50 percent in 2013 to the social network’s growth. eMarketer also predicted a modest gain for Twitter, to 2.6 percent in 2014, from 2.4 percent in 2013 and 1.5 percent in 2012. For the sector as a whole, eMarketer projected that mobile advertising will jump 75.1 percent in 2014, to $31.45 billion, accounting for nearly one-quarter of total worldwide digital ad spending.

In 2012, only 11 percent of Facebook’s net ad revenues worldwide came from mobile, and last year, that figure jumped to 45.1 percent. In 2014, eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 63.4 percent of Facebook’s net digital ad revenues. Mobile accounted for 23.1 percent of Google’s net ad revenues worldwide in 2013, and eMarketer estimates this share will increase to 33.8 percent this year.

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.

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.

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

Within each contact, you also now have an expanded relationship view that integrates all of the interactions you’ve had with a particular person over the different networks that have been integrated, along with any reminders that you have set yourself to connect in the future. This is a pretty nifty feature in that it doesn’t require manual updates for past events; instead it automatically aggregates whatever has happened already into a timeline of events

mobile is its fastest-growing consumer service at the moment, with 27% of its 155 million monthly users visiting LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views jumping 250% year-over-year.

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