June 2022

Tumblr introduced Blaze in April 2022. It’s a way to sponsor one of your Tumblr posts so that it reaches more people. You pay a certain amount of money. Tumblr pushes your post to people’s dashboards until the post reaches a certain number of impressions.

When I released “Timers for travelers,” I figured I’d try blazing the post about it. I paid $10 for 2,500 impressions.

My post was approved. It traveled to a bunch of people’s dashboards for the next 24 hours. A confirmation email I got from Tumblr said that the cutoff was 24 hours. Not the number of impressions. So it’s possible my post would get more than 2,500 impressions.

After the 24-hour period, Tumblr sent me a report:

The post got 4,340 impressions (remember, I paid for 2,500) and 35 total engagements.

For comparison, my other zines I’ve posted to Tumblr get a handful of engagements. Sponsoring this post definitely led to more engagements than my posts normally get.

A couple things to note:

1. Tumblr doesn’t let you choose a target audience. Your sponsored posts gets pushed to people’s dashboards…seemingly at random. It’s not clear if there’s an algorithm deciding. But you don’t get to choose based on user demographics or interests.
2. You can’t schedule when your post gets sponsored (at least for now). So you blaze your post, the Tumblr team approves it, and then it gets pushed to people’s dashboards. If you wanted your post to be sponsored at a specific time, that would be difficult to get exact timing.

I think it’s amusing that you can’t pick a target audience or set up sponsored posts ahead of time. In a sense, Tumblr is poking fun at marketing tactics. But yeah, Tumblr Blaze doesn’t work the same way as sponsoring posts on other social media platforms.

Even so, I would totally Blaze another post. It’s a good way to support Tumblr. And considering it’s the only social media platform that doesn’t frustrate me, I’m more than happy to throw some money at it.