Some interesting results from my little Blaze experiment
(First screenshot: Blaze approval email)
----------------------------------------------------- (Second screenshot: Information box that pops up when I click the blaze icon on the post)
So, this morning I coughed up 10 bucks to get my “impostussy got me acting sus” typewritten shitpost blazed.
In classic Tumblr fashion, the information I’m getting about the Blaze campaign appears to be all kinds of incorrect.
I don’t know when exactly I paid for this, but the 10:44 “started” time from the second screenshot sounds about right. That means that, according to the email in the first screenshot, tumblr started showing my sponsored post 33 minutes before I sponsored it.
In reality, judging by the timestamps of reblogs, I started getting a burst of notes on the post at 11:03 AM. The approval email was sent at 11:02, so that part checks out. Many of these reblogs had tags along the lines of “sponsored,” “blaze,” or “OP paid for me to see this.” The last direct reblog by a user who doesn’t follow me was at 11:17, 15 minutes after the Blaze campaign was approved.
At first I was pretty certain that all 2500 impressions came in that brief 15-minute window -- after all, that’s what I was seeing in the notes -- but according to the approval email, they’re supposed to be spread out over 24 hours. And of course, to address the elephant in the room that I haven’t even mentioned yet, the blaze information button claims that the sponsored post has been shown zero times. Which is obviously not true given all the notes from users saying they saw it as a sponsored post.
TL;DR: I sponsored a post for 10 bucks. Tumblr claims they started showing it more than half an hour before I sponsored it, and also claims that they haven’t shown it to anyone yet, despite the notes being full of users commenting on the fact that they saw it from Blaze.
Never change, tumblr.
