While you were mocking the rich kids of Instagram, they all moved to Tumblr.
New market research provided by Tumblr to AdWeek reveals that the median income of Tumblr users is higher than that of other main social media platforms.
That means that all those businessy types who spent years declaring Tumblr’s business prospects “unattractive,” and handwringing over its perceived cultural status as a vapid, arty playground for teenage girls may now be eating their words. It turns out Tumblr’s younger, mostly female demographic has more money to spend than everyone else.
@ajaromano those are the same EXPERTS who said we “can’t afford to ignore google+.” i dance on their grave.
— andréa lopez (@bluechoochoo) September 15, 2014
Tumblr reported to AdWeek that the median household income of its user base is $80,075. That puts it just ahead of Twitter and Facebook ($79,562 and $78,967, respectively), and well-ahead of Pinterest ($70,124).
Market analyst Tamara Gaffney characterized Tumblr’s userbase as “young, trendy and well-educated urbanites” who are more than willing to shell out for Tumblr advertisers—provided their sleek, sponsored ads are attractive enough to catch the hipster Tumblr user’s eye as she traverses her dashboard.
Tumblr has about 50 million active users. About 13 million of them are in the U.S. That’s tiny compared to the reach of other social media sites; but most of Tumblr’s users are also deeply engaged, which may be why they also deliver higher revenue on mobile ad clickthroughs than most Facebook or Twitter posts. The revenue for visit from a Tumblr mobile app is $2.57 on tablets and 67 cents on smartphones. That’s even more remarkable when you consider how much Tumblr users generally seem to hate Tumblr’s mobile app, which has a tendency to turn Tumblr’s image-rich dashboard feed into an endless series of grey boxes.
The push by Tumblr to release this demographic data reflects the inexorable shift in the company’s ambivalent attitude toward ad revenue since it was acquired—some say snatched from the jaws of death—by Yahoo last year. The change in focus seems to have paid off: The company’s ad revenue per visit has grown astronomically, skyrocketing 340 percent between 2012 and 2013.
It’s undoubtedly a shift that’s also driven by Tumblr’s own userbase, more than half of whom have purchased something they saw on their dashboard.
Of course, that something could be anything from house-elf pants to cat cosplay, but Tumblr’s still working out its brand targeting.
In the meantime, we predict the business industry will be paying a lot more attention to Tumblr users—and their precious disposable income.
Photo via jhaymesisvip/Flickr;CC-BY-SA 3.0
