DataSift teams up with Tumblr to help analyze its data

Company will find trends and high traffic topics on Tumblrs 137 million blogs and 61 million posts

As everyone knows, Yahoo bought Tumblr earlier this year for around $1 billion. And I don't have to tell you that nobody would make that kind of investment in a company unless they were going to make sure they could make money off of it. And, in this case, that means advertisements.

Not to make it too simple but: money requires advertisements. And advertisements require data. Ok, maybe it is that simple.

That is why Tumblr has teamed up with social data platform company DataSift. DataSift will comb through social data from the microblogging website, in order to find out what users are talking about, and what topics most engage them, it was announced on Monday

The information that DataSift will be looking at will not just be real-time data of what Tumblr users are posting now, but also Tumblr's historic data, which will "enable organizations to run sentiment analysis on the more than 5.5 billion global Tumblr interactions that happen each month," DataSift wrote in a blog post.

"The explosion of real-time consumer engagement on social channels such as Tumblr provides brands with unprecedented insight into consumer attitudes and behavior, allowing for tighter relationships with consumers."

And there is quite a lot of data to go through:  the site has over over 137 million blogs and 61 million posts. That is a lot for brands and advertisers to get through without some help,

It looks like DataSift has already spent the last two weeks already going through some of Tumblr's data and already come up with some key pieces of information.

For example, DataSift found that topics related to fashion and reail trended highly over the last two weeks because of Fashion Week in New York and London. The company also found that post on Tumblr that contained visuals or .GIF files were much more likely to be reblogged than standard written content.

Using that information, an advertiser would know which topics and types of stories would give them the most eyeballs, and the most traction. More traction means more money, and a better investment for Yahoo.

“Brands have turned to Tumblr for new ways to connect with highly engaged users and engage in brand storytelling,” Derek Gottfrid, VP of Product at Tumblr, said in a statement. “Through this partnership with DataSift, we’re delighted to enable these brands and agencies to unlock new insights about the audience that is consuming and sharing their creative content.”

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. VatorNews has reached out to Yahoo and we will update with their response.

Founded in November 2010, by CTO Nick Halstead, who also created TweetMeme, the makers of the original "Retweet" button, DataSift enables enterprises and entrepreneurs to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on social networks, most notably on Twitter.

Here's how it works: if a company, say Starbucks, is interested in getting feedback about a new special it is running in a particular region, a DataSift search can be created to target certain geographical areas, key search terms and then analyze whether the responses are positive or negative. 

The San Francisco-based company has customers that include Fortune 500 and social technology companies, news organizations, consulting companies, and government agencies.

The company has raised just under $30 million, most recently taking in $15 million in Series B funding from  Scale Venture Partners, with participation from DataSift’s previous investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures, along with new investors Northgate Capital and Daher Capital.

Before being bought by Yahoo, the New York City-based Tumblr raised a total of $125 million, including a $30 million round in December 2010 from Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, and an $85 million round of financing back in September 2011 from Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners, along with participation from The Virgin Group’s chief Richard Branson, Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital.

(Image source: https://www.tumblr.com)