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Adverts coming to the Tumblr Dashboard soon

At the annual AdAge Digital conference, Tumblr CEO David Karp (pictured inset) said that advertisers will soon be able to buy ad units on the Featured area of the Tumblr Dashboard.

The Tumblr Dashboard is the user home page, where all registered users see the stream of blog posts from other users they follow on the social blogging platform. The Featured section is on the right hand side of the Dashboard. According to the Tumblr About page, there are over 52 million total blogs, with each blog equating to an individual, although it’s completely possible some users have more than one blog. There are also over 21 billion total blog posts, and it doesn’t look like Tumblr will be slowing down anytime soon in popularity. Will Tumblr become as ubiquitous as Facebook?

The announcement may not come to positive fan fare, as ads typically are frowned upon by users, but in order for Tumblr to monetize their startup, they are trying different things and ad units traditionally are a guaranteed way to generate revenue. As long as the ad units aren’t over bearing on the Dashboard, I think it should go over without a hitch and should help grow the site given the new source of revenue. Recently Tumblr added Highlighted Posts as another way to stimulate their revenue stream.