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TUMBLR DEBUTS NATIVE ADS: Yahoo is now powering sponsored posts (a form of native advertising) on Tumblr.
The integration will offer advertisers a bevy of tools and technologies that they can use to better measure the performance of their ads on Tumblr.
Although the sponsored posts unit is still in its early stages, Tumblr founder David Karp said that they are being reblogged (akin to resharing or retreating) 10,000 times on average — an impressive volume, which leads to significant reach.
This level of reach leads us to believe that native ads will be a huge success for Tumblr. We looked at the most shared unpaid brand content on Tumblr between July 5 and August 4 (see chart at right), and saw that most brands were having trouble surpassing 10,000 reblogs across all of their content over that period of time.
Therefore, there is now a huge incentive for brands on Tumblr to take advantage of Tumblr's promising new ad unit.
TROUBLE AT VINE?: Dom Hofman, co-founder of video-sharing app Vine (now owned by Twitter), is rolling back his day-to-day responsibilities so that he can work on a new startup. His leave raises concerns about Twitter's ability to retain key employees at Vine. (Re/Code)
FACEBOOK USERS DECIDE WHAT'S QUALITY CONTENT: Back in December, when Facebook said that it would be tweaking its news feed algorithm to surface more high-quality content, everyone was wondering what exactly constituted something being "high quality." We now know that users themselves will help define what they consider quality content via surveys that are now appearing in the news feed. Those survey responses will likely help the news feed algorithm decide what type of content a user should see. (Re/Code)
BIZ STONE'S NEW STARTUP: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone launched a new social app called Jelly. The app is a mobile question-and-answer service, allowing users to upload a photo of anything and ask a question to accompany it. Then that user's connections (imported from Facebook and/or Twitter) can answer the question. (Jelly Blog)
YAHOO LAUNCHES TECH SITE: At the Consumer Electronics Show yesterday, Yahoo launched a new tech site, simply called Yahoo! Tech. Unlike most industry tech sites and blogs, Yahoo! Tech appears to be trying to appeal to a less tech savvy audience. (Yahoo! Tech)
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