Tag: tumblr

Tumblr’s New Video Chat App Is For Watching YouTube With Friends

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Tumblr is built around the idea of bringing strangers together on the basis of shared interests. So it is a bit surprising to see the Yahoo-owned social network to come out with video chat app designed for bringing real-life friends together. This new app named Cabana enables a group video chat of up to six people at the same time to watch YouTube videos. After joining a Cabana chat, anyone in the room will be able to browse through YouTube and select a video, which will start playing for everyone in the group chat. There is no direct link to Tumblr at the moment in the Cabana app, which launches on iOS today in the United States and will come to Android in a few weeks.

What Brands Need To Do
This new Cabana app, along with the Houseparty app created by the team behind Meerkat, is ushering a new casual mode for online video chats. Both apps are designed for facilitating group chats and allow users to jump in and out of chats with ease, replacing the comparatively formal, one-on-one Facetime sessions with an interaction that is more spontaneous and closer to a two-way live streaming experience.

There is currently no ad products available on either of those two apps, and few brands have explored them to reach their young-skewing users. But if this type of casual video chat apps starts to take off, brands may consider adapting to this new mode of live interactions by taking a more of-the-moments approach and hosting their own YouTube viewing parties for either branded content or sponsored influencer content.

 

Source: The Verge

Header image courtesy of Cabana App in iTunes Store

Tumblr Ramps Up Ads By Putting Ads On More Blogs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Tumblr is taking a significant step to increase its ad inventory by rolling out a new ad program that puts more ads across its network of blogs. Starting Thursday, sponsored posts and sponsored video ads will start appearing on Tumblr’s slide-out section on the web, on the main page of blogs using the default Optica theme, as well as on its mobile apps and mobile web. Users can earn money off those on-blog ads if they sign up for Tumblr’s Creatrs program. This program is applied to Tumblr’s network of over 306 million blogs from 65 million users by default, but users who wish not to see ads on their blogs can opt out of the program in settings.

What Brands Need To Do
Since this opt-out program displays ads on Tumblr blogs, it effectively enables Tumblr to monetize its vast amount of blogs that reach all visitors, whereas previously Tumblr’s ad products only reach logged-in users. In 2013, Tumblr was purchased for $1.1 billion by Yahoo, which, in turn, will be acquired by Verizon by early next year. As Verizon plans to integrate Yahoo’s online ad business into AOL, we expect to see Tumblr further step up its ad efforts in the near future. For now, brands advertising on Tumblr will gain a significantly wider reach for their ads.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Tumblr Launches Live Video Through Syndication

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Tumblr launched a live video feature on Tuesday. Unlike its competitors, however, the Yahoo-owned company neither developed a native streaming product in-house a la Facebook, nor did it acquire a startup to integrate with its service like Twitter did with Periscope. Instead, Tumblr is teaming up with several live-streaming sites such as YouTube, YouNow, AOL’s Kanvas, and Betaworks-backed Upclose to allow broadcasters to cross-post their livestreams to their linked Tumblr blogs.

Tumblr users will receive a push notification when someone they follow posts a live video, and the posts will also be pinned atop dashboard feeds to boost visibility. Users will also have the option to save their livestreams as a regular video post on Tumblr once they are done. Besides syndicating content from other services, Tumblr is also working closely with publishers such as Mashable, Refinery29, MTV and The Huffington Post to promote their live video across Tumblr’s “owned channels.”

Why Brands Should Care
By joining forces with several livestreaming sites, Tumblr can help broadcasters on those services reach a bigger audience and offers them a good place to build an archive for their live video content. Although Tumblr has yet to lay out a plan to monetize this new product, it is still a new channel that brands experimenting with live content should heed. As live video starts to take off, brands should consider sponsorships or broadcasting their own events to connect with their audience and draw some new eyeballs.

While it is safe to say that Tumblr, along with all other services it joined forces with, has a lot of catching up to do to compete with Facebook, which just signed about 140 deals with celebrities and media companies for live content creation, it is important that brands try out different platforms to figure out which one best matches with their target audience.

 

Source: Marketing Land

 

Toyota Sponsors Yahoo’s Livestream Of The Stagecoach Music Festival

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Another brand has jumped on the live-stream bandwagon as Toyota announced it will be sponsoring the livestreams of the country music festival Stagecoach on Yahoo and Tumblr this weekend. The announcement came just one week after T-Mobile sponsored YouTube’s livestream of Coachella. As part of its campaign to promote the music content site “Music Moves You” that the company recently launched, Toyota says it is expecting the livestreams to reach “millions” over the weekend. The sponsorship includes Toyota branding at the top of the live-stream player’s page, as well as 30-second and shorter pre-roll video spots.

What Brands Need To Do
Livestreaming is starting to explode across digital channels with Facebook making a strong push for its Live video feature in the past few months, which creates new opportunities for brands seeking to engage with online audiences in real time. In fact, recent research from Brandlive shows that 44% of companies created live video content in 2015. Therefore, now is the time for brands to start exploring possible sponsorships with live-streaming platforms for events that may appeal to their target audiences.

 

Source: AdWeek

Tumblr Launches GIF Maker To Help Brands Create Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Tumblr, home to endless reblogged GIFs, has finally come out with its own GIF-making tool to help users create fun animated images with ease. Aptly named GIF Maker, the new feature is built into Tumblr’s mobile app and can help you turn photo bursts and videos in your camera roll into GIFs. The Yahoo-owned microblogging platform has been paying special attention to GIFs as of late, introducing a GIF search function and a dedicated GIF-watching section named Tumblr TV in June.

What Brands Need To Do
GIFs have long been an uber-popular format in Tumblr’s ecosystem, and GIF Maker can help brands and marketers on Tumblr create more viral, shareable content. As Tumblr continues to make itself more brand-friendly and easier to use, brands should build a presence on this valuable content marketing platform and try out this new content creation tool.

 

Source: The Verge

How Brands Can Make Use Of Tumblr’s New Messaging Feature

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Without much fanfare, Tumblr has rolled out a crucial feature that has been missing from its platform – private instant messaging. The microblogging platform has long offered an inbox feature for its users to ask and answer each other’s questions, but now it supports threaded one-on-one messaging as well. This new feature is available in Tumblr’s mobile apps on iOS and Android, as well as its desktop website.

What Brands Need To Do
Tumblr has been growing its platform as a content and social marketing channel following Yahoo’s billion-dollar acquisition in 2013, and some brands have gotten on board. Nescafé, for instance, opted to move its traditional website to Tumblr in hopes of “building stronger relationships with younger consumers” earlier this year. The existing Ask Inbox feature on Tumblr works great for repurposing those Q&As as user-generated branded content, and the addition of a messaging feature can help facilitate deeper communication between users and brands. For brands on Tumblr, this new chat tool should come in handy for customer relationship management.

 

Source: The Verge

Why Nescafe Abandoned Their Own Site For Tumblr

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé is converting its Nescafé.com into a Tumblr blog. The reasons behind this rather unorthodox move seem to be trifold. First, according to Nescafé’s marketing chief Michael Chrisment, moving all its web assets to the Tumblr platform is aimed at “building stronger relationships with younger consumers.” Second, it allows Nestlé to tap into the social sharing effect and user-generated content that Tumblr has to offer. Lastly, by switching to Tumblr’s platform, Nestlé eliminated the hefty cost of creating and maintaining the back-end of their sites.

What Brands Should Do
Of course, not all brands need to be as radical as Nestlé and start converting websites to social platforms. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that, as consumers continue to move towards mobile and social platforms and away from desktop websites, making content easily accessible and shareable is becoming increasingly important to the success of branded content. Therefore, it is time for brands, especially those seeking the attention of younger generations, to reevaluate their digital presence and reconsider their content strategies.

 

Source: The Verge

How Medium Is Becoming More Like Tumblr

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Popular industry blog platform Medium is introducing a series of changes that encourages its users to share stories of shorter length. The platform is also replacing its front-page “channels” with “tags” for content discovery, furthering its resemblance with Tumblr, for better or worse.

While it makes sense that Medium would want to make itself more accessible to casual bloggers in order to reach a broader mainstream user base, some worry that such changes could cost Medium its core asset— the staple “Medium Post”, —thereby losing its differentiating point.

Why Tumblr And Snapchat Have Turned To Original Content

Posted on by Lab Team

Read the original on: The Verge

This week, both Snapchat and Tumblr unveiled plans to move into content marketing. Snapchat will start pushing original content created by its newly hired media team through its new Discovery feature.  Meanwhile, Tumblr announced the launch of the Creatrs Network, which essentially acts as a creative agency for Tumblr users that will help connect them with brands and other organizations that want to utilize their original content. Despite such different areas of focus, both companies are exploring new ways to engage with their audience via quality content.

Yahoo Sites Start Integrating Ads From Tumblr

Posted on by Lab Team

Sponsored posts on Tumblr for brands like Lexus, Lipton, and “Hunger Games” will start showing up on Yahoo sites. This cross-platform integration makes perfect sense, given Yahoo’s continuous efforts in integrating the microblogging platform it purchased last year into its business. Plus, for the image-heavy digital magazines sites like Yahoo Tech, Tumblr already serves as the editorial publishing tool for these sites and has been used to create those sites’ ads since their introduction.