If your dash is at all similar to mine, you’d have no reason to suspect that Tumblr’s user base is particularly privileged, financially speaking—but then again, it’s difficult to gauge a community’s wealth from its knack for curating cat videos and pizza tattoos. But according to new market research provided to AdWeek by Tumblr itself, the blogging service’s users have a median household income of $80,075, making them apparently more affluent than people on Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest. So how to account for all this perceived wealth? And what do these findings mean for the Tumblr community?
It’s important to reiterate that the market research accounted for “annual household income,” so that $80K figure could be attributed to the parents of what The Daily Dot describes as Tumblr’s “younger, mostly female” demographic. But market analyst Tamara Gaffney told AdWeek that regardless of where that financial heft is originating from, Tumblr’s self-analysis still makes the site more attractive to advertisers than ever before:
Tumblr is small but mighty and offers retailers a visually stimulating environment […] The fact that it produces the highest revenue per visit from mobile devices is likely due to its user base, which is skewed to young, trendy and well-educated urbanites with a greater affinity for online purchases and the disposable income to spend more.
If these findings increase advertisers’ interest in Tumblr’s 50 million active users, it could have a huge impact on the blogging network’s prospects. The Daily Dot points out that some analysts believe Tumblr was “snatched from the jaws of death” when it was acquired by Yahoo last year; this new research could prevent the site from ever being that imperiled again. There’s also something vindicating about watching advertisers who previously dismissed Tumblr suddenly develop an interest in the network for one of the very reasons they pooh-poohed the blogging platform previously: its popularity with young, primarily female users.
Regardless of how misleading that $80K figure might be, there’s no denying that Tumblr’s community appears to have more disposable income than users on other social media platforms. The Daily Dot claims the revenue for visit from a Tumblr mobile app is “$2.57 on tablets and 67 cents on smartphones,” and an Adobe Report reveals that a retail referral from a Tumblr link is more valuable than a referral from Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. It’ll be interesting to see how new interest from advertisers will impact Tumblr users’ experience on the site–but according to Lee Brown, Tumblr’s global head of brand partnerships, members of the community are already accustomed to using the platform for their “purchasing aspirations”:
Not only do our users have the greatest spending power, but they also spend the most time on our platform […] They are both engaged and active, taking that next crucial step to buy what they discover on Tumblr (and then post about it).
The customer journey begins on Tumblr with prepurchase aspiration and ends on Tumblr for postpurchase celebration, making Tumblr the ultimate destination for shopping.
Hey, at least if “urbanite” users like myself ever get sick of having our “purchasing aspirations” (I can’t even with that phrase) pandered to, we can always just tell advertisers about DashCon. Where was our trendiness then?
(Images via Themonsterghost and AdWeek)
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Published: Sep 16, 2014 01:05 pm