The attack of the revenue model

Ars Technica is reporting that Tumblr will begin showing ads in May.

On Wednesday, Tumblr announced in an apparent about-face that it would be allowing paid advertisement on the popular blogging platform. David Kamp, Tumblr CEO and founder, made the announcement at Ad Age’s Digital Conference today in New York.

I wonder how much money they make from premium theme sales. I dug around but couldn’t find any information on the revenue split with theme developers. Obviously they don’t make enough to keep a service this large afloat.

From the details, it sounds like they’ll only be displaying ads on the dashboard view which makes sense to me. The Tumblr dashboard view is clean and sparse, plenty of room for an ad or two while not cluttering the view.

Remember kids, if you’re not paying for a service, don’t get upset when they need ad revenue to make money.