It never fails to amuse me when I get “hello influencer” emails wanting me to push questionable products to my followers.
Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.
The fuck makes you think I’ll shill your discount wish shit?
Also, it’s Tumblr. If I try to tell anyone about your knock-off Wish-quality sex toy there’s going to be a horde of Autistic lesbians doing a power point presentation in the notes about safe sex toy material and correct battery storage.
Which I am 100% down for, but it will not get you any sales.
I was trying to figure out if you were someone important on a other platform, because there’s no way in hell anyone actually thinks you can be classified as “Influencer” if you have a big Tumblr blog.
And then also think advertising to this mob would be a good idea
There are actually lots of people who sell stuff successfully on here, usually drop ship stuff.
They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it’s marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).
And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.
I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.
They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it’s on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.
It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.
They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.
This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.
It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.
Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.
So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.
But there are also drop-ship sellers on here who get enough of a kick-back from affiliate links to make selling cutesy kitsch stuff worth their time on here. They’re just making sure you don’t know you’re being marketed to.
those product posts thinly disguised as “omfg look at this cool thing!/I found it online!” seem to come in waves and once you’ve noticed the pattern they’re just annoying - unless they’re marine biology/dinosaur plushies of course in which case it’s just an opportunity to gawp
The most recent one I can think of is that jellyfish light. That’s 100% an ad, just hidden in tumblr-speak.
I find I can generally tell when it’s an ad posted by a corp/dropshipper vs someone extremely passionate selling something they made and love, but there’s a lot of the former floating around
God, thank you for saying something. I seriously considered making this same post back in July when I started noticing more and moreposts of this kind with thousands of notes. Some of them were getting pushed onto my dashboard from a few of the most popular tags I track (like “artists on tumblr”) but a few were getting shared by actual people who I follow (omg these ethereal dragon hair clips are perfect for cosplays… 😒)
(Screenshots I took at the time - this particular blog has been thoroughly scrubbed from existence in the meantime.)
There is an extensive interconnected network of blogs with URLs like haha-lol-cute-funny, daily-meme-inspiration, omg-wow-tiktoks, etc. that bulk post vast quantities of stolen memes with broad appeal, spam them in a million popular tags, and then reblog them back and forth from each other. Once any given meme takes off, the OP is edited and the meme replaced with one of these stealth ads. Then, because of the inflated note count, the ad version of the post will get pushed to the dashboards of anyone tracking those tags.
If you go into the notes of any of these, half the reblogs will still be of the original meme. Here’s an example: Original meme / the ad it turned into.
(The OP of this one has already been taken down - screenshots because the images in this post are also liable to get scrubbed.)
The note count has the added benefit of making it look like thousands of real people are excited about the item in the post, and, for better or worse, people are strongly motivated by things they think others in their community are doing.
I see all the linked posts have already been deleted lmao.
lol they’re deleting things so fast tonight.
They really don’t like being called out.
Also if these show up in the tags of something they’re not actually related to/supposed to be in, you can report them as spam. Because they are.
