There are a million and one correct reasons why "corporate sponsored tumblr influencer making money" would never work. But one reason which I rarely see mentioned is that, for every Popular Post By Popular Tumblr User, only a small percentage of its notes came directly from source. The rest came from spread.
Like I genuinely think there is no singular Tumblr user with enough active followers to produce a Popular Post without reblogs that breach well outside their circle. There's a few who could probably get a ~1,000 note likes-only post on a post with reblogs disabled. Which is really not doing numbers compared to some standard-fare tumblr post like "enjoying my penits and crackerjacks" with 10,000 notes from some OP with 300 followers.
Posts cannot do numbers without the broader tumblr community's say-so. And the vast majority of those people do not give a shit about any single OP. And a single OP, even with top-tier follower count, could never generate post escape-velocity by shilling bullshit no one wants to people who are actively hostile to advertising.
We have had very successful corporate-sponsored Tumblr scam artists, however.
Hey now, scam artists doesn't seem fair.
Just because we trick people into getting things they don't actually want, and misrepresent the things they are getting, and make it difficult to fully delete your account, and buy up all the competitors, and steal your data without your knowledge to sell it to the highest bidder, and been known to proudly advertise our algorithms that can detect when you are at your lowest point mentally and take advantage of you by showing you ads targeted to your insecurities, engaged in voter manipulation MANY times even if you don't include US and UK, been happily complicit in several genocides either because we weren't bothered to hire people who spoke the language to properly monitor how our websites are being used or because we actually stood to make a profit in some way.
We're just trying to make a good product.
