The Tumblr Blaze Experience🔥

I paid for some advertising earlier this month (TCM's first ad run, woo!) and I wanted to do a small write up on the experience.  I know some of yall are game developers yourself and every dollar counts so let me tell you about how it went for me.

What is it:

Tumblr Blaze is the paid advertising/sponsored post system on Tumblr.com  Tumblr is famous for being a shitposting haven full of failed corporate buyouts and a general dislike of run-of-the-mill sponsored content as you would see on sites like Twitter and Reddit.

Who's the Audience:

The Tumblr demographics are a little all over the place- there are niche pockets of almost any common internet culture there- but by and large, most of the population is centered in the US and UK, millennial-aged, about equally used by men and women, and more likely to identify as LGBTQIA+ than not. (https://cloudincome.com/tumblr-statistics/)

What does Tumblr Blaze Do:

Like most sponsored content programs, Tumblr lets you pay an amount for a minimum number of impressions.  Impressions roughly equal the number of people who SEE the content, not who clicked on it.

What Tumblr Blaze does NOT do is let you choose how the ad is targeted... which... is very wild to me.  Tumblr uses its own secret algorithm to match your content to blogs it thinks are similar without input from you.

Which Plan to Choose:

At a glance, the $65 dollar option seemed to be the most cost effective, especially considering I hadn't used Blaze before and was unsure if it would be worth the investment.  20k impressions is a heft chunk of users for someone with my size reach.  On Itch.io, the only website TCM is hosted, I average about 75k impressions per week almost exclusively from people seeing the game on Itch itself.  20k from offsite seemed to be a worthy investment.

What Content Did I Push:

I wrote a brief intro to the game that included links to the website, itch, and patreon, + current update status, and a small blurb about me and how the game is made.  The TCM tumblr was also brand new, only 3 or 4 days old at this point so I had basically zero engagement.

How Did the Campaign do on Tumblr:

So one of the things that makes Tumblr very different form other social media platforms is that people don't go on Tumblr to be fed content at all.  People follow friends and have cliques, unlike many social's "best content" pushes.  This engagement is real and active engagement on the post, meaning that the people who liked/reblogged/replied likely actually read the entire thing and possibly checked out some of the external links.  For small fish like me, these numbers were pretty impressive over a 24hr period.

Okay, what do the offsite numbers look like:

You can clearly see the jump in all three metrics over the 8th and 9th on my Itch.io engagement graphs.  Additionally, the Tumblr.com domain now shows under my referring traffic links.

So far, this is all Pretty Impressive and a reasonably effective use of 65$ from the marketing budget. (That I don't officially have lol)

So what are the drawbacks:

Tumblr users want Tumblr content.  They're very into a certain flavor of games/media and very into queer narratives + the creators that make them.  Obviously, this isn't a bad thing but if your product is maybe a little too mainstream you might have trouble enticing interaction from them.  Which brings me to my last point:

Negative interaction!  Its just the reality of the online world we live in and I've been super fortunate to have dealt with 99.9999% extremely chill and fun people while working on this game.  Tumblr can kind of be a PvP Zone sometimes so to be honest I was expecting some flak.  To my delight, we only had two obnoxious interactions but it is something you'll want to consider before Blazing content.

Content warning for Coarse Language below!

This is honestly one of my favorite things.  We have achieved "Passably Gay" from merely a visual standpoint which is something I wanted from TCM's inception.  (I didn't respond to this person, I just blocked them and moved along, my strategy of choice on Tumblr).

Then some other person got mad that they were seeing sponsored content and decided to comment and then two other people I don't know jumped in.  (Gray block is the above blocked homie)

So like... as far as internet incivility goes this is tame, I'd rate it like a 1 or 2 on the Spicy Scale and definitely not something worth deterring you from running a campaign.  It's simply a fact of life though that *especially* on tumblr where there's very little active moderation past tag banning, you're inevitably going to see stuff like this and there won't be much you can do about it.

Overall?

I thought Blaze was worth the money.  I had a noticeable hit, real engagement, and external traffic directed to itch.  I don't plan on running another campaign until after Amir drops but I would definitely consider it again.

Anyway, I hope that was interesting!  And I hope this helps any other devs out there wondering how best to maximize their budget.