Not diminishing your situation, but respectfully, you likely weren't the target customer-base for their ad sales team at that stage of the game. Sounds like your budget was too low, and you're a direct response advertiser (from the "revenue-positive" comment). That $25k min. spend is a sales qualifier and looks like it was successful in filtering you out in favor of advertisers who don't bat an eye at testing something new for $25k sight-unseen.

With big media properties that are being cleaned up, a lot of that early focus is typically on big brands who are doing large branding efforts that have cool and sexy creative and are super customized to the platform. They want to reach lots of people, and the property in turn wants to leverage it as a large case study to attract other brand advertisers.

What you were looking for would not help meet their objectives because your budget was likely too small, and because they are a new display-driven property, they don't want advertisers focused on performance. Why? Well, most performance advertisers are not super savvy with how they look at display performance, and would be looking at it from a last click measurement standpoint where it would almost certainly bomb (like most display, social, etc.). Big brands doing branding plays are looking for reach and engagement (or post-impression performance metrics in some cases). This is better for Tumblr for purposes of building case studies and selling in to other big brands, because big brands tend to not care as much about overpriced CPMs, which means more margin for Tumblr.

Again, down the line it might have made sense that you could make a lot of money for your brand and might have been a good fit, but realistically, you just weren't their target. Same reason FB weeded out all the crappy affiliate ads to the best of their ability and started pushing big brands for engagement-based stuff.

> That $25k min. spend is a sales qualifier and looks like it was successful in filtering you out...

This sounds like an effective way for any company dependent on sales to fail. Especially online advertising sales where your incremental cost is approximately zero.

There should be a term for management that makes this mistake.

I disagree entirely. Particularly for a big display platform like Tumblr, that had a reputation for tons of porn and generally low-quality impressions, big companies need to see other big companies take the risk and do cool branding stuff that gets talked about. That takes investment, and means that you need to focus all of your business efforts in attracting that target, and then making sure they are successful.

With small budget direct response advertisers, all too often you get people who promise they will spend more if it is profitable, but because they don't know how to properly value display (see my last click comment) they won't see last click success, and will thus not be a repeat advertiser. Beyond that, they will also contribute to spreading the word that Tumblr is not a quality inventory source, which could kill them before they had a chance to really shine.

If I'm trying to grow ad sales on a property as large as Tumblr with the reputation it had, the first thing I'm going to do is make it clear that the focus is first and foremost on big brands and not the little guy. That's what brings in the dollars, not the latter. The little guys come in once you are already at scale with proven success for big brands.

Once that is successful with your limited sales resources, then and only then do you create a self-serve platform for small direct response advertisers with minimal 1:1 contact (ala AdWords, Bing Ads, etc.).

You need to think of the long game and think of where you would prioritize your resources. Would you rather get a small inconsistent cashflow of people who are likely to talk crap about your inventory because they don't know how to properly measure it if they don't see a positive ROI after spending a couple grand? Or would you rather focus all your efforts on big brands who know what they are doing, have the budget to do highly visible tests, and aren't afraid to "waste" 10's of thousands of dollars testing something new that might not work out?

Yeah, I understand that folks have to focus on the right customers, and that they can't have salespeople emailing with customers who aren't big enough to justify the time cost. However, given the demographic on Tumblr, it's likely that many of the brands that would have actually given the type of native-seeming experience (as opposed to display ads) that Tumblr was supposedly looking for would be small and midsize startups. Some of these companies would grow into bigger companies that could afford to spend big dollars on Tumblr. And as FB and Google have shown, you don't have to have individual salespeople emailing with every customer. You can set up an automated system where people can purchase advertising, even in small amounts. Again, not saying this was the right move for them, but it looks like the $25k-cutoff move didn't work out so hot either. Hopefully they'll change that someday so that we can advertise with them...

Lastly, I should have said "profitably", not "revenue positive". Thanks for not dinging my accidental misuse.

Respectfully, I think you're still missing my point.

It isn't primarily about the time cost for the sales team. It is about what sort of image they want to portray for "what companies advertise on Tumblr." If you see a bunch of acai and weightloss ads, and you're a big brand, you're not going to advertise there. That's a problem, because odds are you have a lot more money to spend. So in order to attract the right advertisers, Tumblr has to portray an image of success that aligns with those targets.

So your statement about small and midsize startups doesn't make sense in that context. They don't want small and midsize startups. Again, they want big brands. And you approach the business strategy for that very differently.

Also, "native" ads aren't really that different than display. I'd personally consider it a subset of display (like video). You generally are looking at post-impression (vs. click) performance, reach, engagement, etc. It is VERY hard to measure well. So small and midsize startups are again not the right fit if they care about measurable ROI.

Tumblr doesn't want "some of these companies" that might grow into bigger companies. They want the big companies that have the big dollars and will pay high-margin CPMs TODAY.

Once you have that business funnel doing well, THEN maybe you consider expanding out to a self-serve platform with lots of small guys. Because at that point large advertisers will know you are a solid inventory source and not be swayed when a tiny little startup who doesn't even know how to set a conversion tag claims that the clicks they are tracking aren't driving them lots of profit (see pretty much every post griping about FB ads on HN).

Also, setting up a self-serve system takes a LOT of work and resources compared to tossing together some janky (but functional) tools that your internal ad ops team can use to traffic things. Which again makes it low on the list.

And "profitably" vs. "revenue positive" doesn't matter--if you care about direct response performance, they don't want you as an advertiser at that stage.

Again, not saying you or other smaller companies couldn't find success on Tumblr. But just because you want them does not mean they want you (at least at the stage they are at). That $25k min. is to weed out smaller budgets and direct response advertisers who need to test small and see profit before continuing to spend more.

I would say this depends heavily on when this happened - when I was on the Tumblr ads team the primary push was to ensure that ads were part of the Tumblr experience - brands would be encouraged to be a part of the ecosystem and it wasn't about getting links out to external sites. This was meant to make ads feel like they were a part of Tumblr, something that people would want to see. Brands like Denny's embraced this approach and have an amazing Tumblr blog and presence because of this - the original engagements they received paid off immensely over time. Other brands which didn't take that approach as seriously, nor knew how to engage with the Tumblr community, probably did not do as well. Things changed for a while after that, especially when ads were no longer being served from the in-house platform we built, but relied more and more on the Yahoo system.

>Brands like Denny's embraced this approach and have an amazing Tumblr blog and presence because of this - the original engagements they received paid off immensely over time.

For those out of the loop: http://imgur.com/gallery/jKs0n

This is truly amazing.

We would have been happy to go this route with our advertising, since clearly the native/organic experience was generating interest for us. Too bad we never had a chance to work with them! Do you know if there's any more flexibility these days? I talked with them October 2015, IIRC.

I had transitioned from the ads team quite a while before that, if I recall correctly, I was on ads from February 2013 through January 2014 - that's around the time things were transitioning to the Yahoo ads platform. I left Tumblr October 2015, so have even less insight now :)

I had the same experience.

Although it wasn't $25K, it was closer to $18K. After grilling the person over email over basic information, they couldn't give me a clear strategy on how my money would be used, the ads constructed, or where the ads would be placed.

It just felt like they were extorted money from companies claiming we needed them not the other way around. It was eye opening they weren't interested in gaining some recurring revenue as opposed to try and get the most money possible in one fell swoop. It was really perplexing to me.

My sense is they weren't going after the digital ad buyers who use Facebook and Google - they were competing against the television and billboard buyers like P&G. This was consistent with Yahoo's move towards video content. It was a real strategy in the sense that they had a target market, made choices on what not to do, and went for their target.

Of course the strategy flopped, but that's another story.