Think your blog posts on Tumblr are pretty good? Just talk to the people who\u2019ve turned those posts into book deals.<\/p>\n
Speaking at PaidContent Live in New York on Wednesday<\/a>, Tumblr CEO David Karp described the site as a creative platform where users are free to grow an audience and develop talent that has the potential to see success elsewhere, such as the 70 users who turned their blogging skills into book deals. Karp said the company saw three book deals for users last month alone, but the company isn\u2019t viewing that as the only metric of success.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s even more interesting to me than people going through traditional paths are people who are using those new emerging platforms,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s so exciting to me about Tumblr as a media network today is this new generation of creative commercialization tools that are being built on top of these other networks. People who don\u2019t have to go to Harpers to publish the book deal, they can self-publish on Kickstarter instead.\u201d<\/p>\n Karp\u2019s focus on creativity is an idea that extends into the way the company is rolling out advertising. The company recently started rolling out mobile advertising<\/a>, and is working on making that advertising fit within the existing Tumblr network.<\/p>\n \u201cWe focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,\u201d Karp said. \u201cIt gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we\u2019ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.\u201d<\/p>\n But Karp noted that Tumblr isn\u2019t profitable yet \u2014 although he expects it eventually will be \u2014 and he noted he has supportive investors for the company, which most recently raised $85 million in venture funding back in 2011<\/a>. The company gained notoriety recently when it shut down Storyboard<\/a>, the experimental project in which it hired an editorial staff to highlight and\u00a0aggregate\u00a0the best content on Tumblr.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a knock on that team at all. We hired a really brilliant team to do really good work. We gave it a shot, we gave it a year. And after a year, we decided it wasn\u2019t the right tool for our toolbox,\u201d Karp said. \u201cIt was working in some regards, but not in the we wanted to see it look.\u201d<\/p>\n Tumblr isn\u2019t that focused on the number of pageviews the site is getting, Karp said, although users create 90 million new Tumblr posts per day. Instead, Karp said the focus has moved to time spent on Tumblr \u2014 now at 14 minutes per day \u2014 and figuring out how to monetize that content as well as helping new users discover interesting content without picking favorites among the blogs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to give you the stuff you\u2019re going to love on Tumblr, but we don\u2019t want to say what great stuff on Tumblr is. We don\u2019t want to say what great content is, or these are our favorite blogs. We don\u2019t wan to color it too much or scare anybody off.\u201d<\/p>\n