Why Tumblr needs Data Science pros

by Marcos Ortiz, Marcos Ortiz Valmaseda

David, you need Data Science Pros to generate more revenue

Disclaimer: First, I’m a not a Tumblr employee, I just love the platform and I want to help them my ideas to generate more revenue because, I think that David( I refer to David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr) is facing some troubles with the investors. Look this post at BusinessInsider around this topic.

I love Tumblr for so many reasons that I want to give to them some ideas how to generate more revenue and take advertising to the next level.

VIP profiles for Tumblr

Yes, I call this new feature: VIP Profiles. What is this? Is a kind of “paid” Tumblr profile (keep reading to know about the pricing strategy for this) dedicated to professionals of the platforms, focused on three kind of users: independent filmmakers, music creators or DJs, professional photographers, and professional writers/bloggers. But, how this can be helpful for Tumblr’s revenues?

Let’s get deeper on this. This is a whole strategy focused on Advertising, Marketing and Partnerships.

VIP Profile for Independent Filmmakers

So, imagine that you are an independent filmmaker and you can promote your fresh film. What you do?

You can post it on YouTube and shoot some many times the link to Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus; and pray to God for the masses.

This approach fails some many times, that you don’t feel good with your work in the video; so you have to make some changes in your mind, and try a different path. Here is when Tumblr VIP Profile for Filmmaker come to play a key role on this change. Is possible that you have a Tumblr’s profile, and you don’t want to be use another because you have some good followers that you don’t want to loose. What do you do? Easily:

  1. “Become on a VIP Profile” paying an incredible short amount of $ 2.99
  2. Upload your video to the platform using Vimeo Connect (new feature: integration with Vimeo Pro)
  3. Click on “Promote Video” button for $ 3,99 (behind this feature, there is a SaaS platform on top of RocketFuel solutions, specially something seemed Social Booster For Facebook, but not just focused on Facebook but thinking in Tumblr too. Facebook Exchange(FBX) platform is a great opportunity right now for advertising efforts, because you could have a potential group of almost 1 billion of users that could see the video) (Your contact: Eshwar Belani, VP of Products and Business Development at RocketFuel)

Are you reading, Derek? What do you think about this? (Dear reader, if you don’t know to Derek, I can help you: he is the VP of Product at Tumblr. He blogs here.)

So, what’s new here?

  • First: a partnership with Vimeo to integrate this amazing high-quality video platform to Tumblr, and then make an agreement with the Business Development Manager at Vimeo to coordinate how both will divide the revenue. Advantages here: Tumblr could become in another social video platform with the help of Vimeo for high-quality videos, and generate more traffic for both platforms
  • Second: A partnership with RocketFuel could become to Tumblr in one of the leading platforms for Digital Advertising, because with the artificial intelligence ads solutions from this amazing team, almost every Tumblr VIP user could become in a marketer without any effort, using a solution delivered by RocketFuel. But Where is the revenue here? It’s a matter of microeconomics: If you train to your VIP users to use wisely the Ads platform(I think that Christhoper is perfect for this work, because he have seen the evolution of the platform since its beginning; so he will be the best person to train to VIP users), to take the lead with the “Promoto Video” button, it would be explote the traffic and revenue for the platform, Think in these numbers: based on the quantity of users that you have, take just a 15% of that quantity for example, and suppose that they want to become in VIP Profiles, and a 5% of them are independent filmmakers and use the “Promote Video” button. Can you imagine the whole picture? Of course, you should take a deep look to Operations costs of all this and evaluate all these like a whole solution, but that’s not my job.

But, Who can help you to identify this potential groups of users to become on VIP profiles? A group of Data Scientists. They can do experiments using the rich Tumblr’s data (MySQL and HBase) to discover these grups of users, using Hadoop in conjuction with Mahout to come out with answers to questions like:

  • Which are the more tagged videos for a particular topic?
  • How many times a particular video have been reblogged?
  • Which are the regions in U.S where more people see videos in the platform?

I just adjust the questions to the VIP profile for Independent filmmakers, but you can imagine the large quantity of questions that you could have when you begin to use this particular team of Data Science pros.

VIP Profile for Music producers and DJs

The same ideas can be shared with this VIP profile, but working with another partner: SoundCloud, which is atracting a lot of attention on these days. Think in a Dj that wants to promote his new song, but he don’t have a lot of resources. What he does? He creates a VIP profile for Djs, and share his song using SoundCloud(another new feature: integration with this platform), and after that, he can use the “Promote Song” button for the same price ($ 3.99) to take the same advantage of RocketFuel-based ads solution.

VIP Profile for Professional photographers

For this VIP profile, you can do a partnership with Flickr or Behance but the promotion here is a little different, because, you will help to promote galleries, not single pictures. I think that galleries makes more sense, because, a particular user, generally speaking; don’t just see a single picture, but, he/she sees several pictures related in a particular topic; so, you can take advantage of that.

VIP Profile for Professional Writers/Bloggers

This is a little different too. I will say to you what I wish at Tumblr like a professional writer:

  • Integration with MailChimp: many professional bloggers use a subscriber’s list to maintain informed to their users, so I think that this would be a great add-on for the platform. But, I will give more, if you do a partnership with MailChimp to low the cost of promotional emails from Tumblr’s users; it would awesome. Then, you can divide the revenue, because you can think in monthly or yearly plans with MailChimps. Charge for this feature: It depends, but I think that it should be between $ 9.00 and $ 15.00, not more.

But, why you need a Data Science team? Keep reading

Now, let me tell you that you don’t need an small Data Science group to work on this on full-time. Don’t you know the answer? Because you need to identify first all these groups of users in the platform. How? Your data is your nervous system, and mainly your tagging system. Using the information here, you can extract all this, using machine-learning techniques like clustering (which is an unsupervised learning method), or predictive analytics techniques to predict for example: how many users that use the platform today could become in VIP profiles? This kind of question, a seasoned Data Scientist can help you on this.

Final Thoughts

So, David, Blake, Evan, Derek and all Tumblr’s team, think about these ideas, hire one or a small groups of Data Scientists, and you will be happy, your investors will say you: “Thanks for become to Tumblr in a valuable business”, and of course: Tumblers will be jumping of happiness with all these features. My payment for this: one Tumblr sticker, one Tumblr t-shirt and one Tumblr mug, just that.

Marcos Luis Ortíz Valmaseda about.me/marcosortiz @marcosluis2186