Tumblr should stop making users watch horror movie ads against their will
lies:
I mostly didn’t mind when Tumblr started running “Sponsored Posts” in my dashboard. Tumblr has to make money. Most of the ads were boring, a few were interesting, but they weren’t a big deal.
Then the horror movie ads started.
I’m surprised this isn’t a bigger issue on tumblr. Horror movies can be extremely triggering for some of us, and I hate seeing them on my dash or on the radar yet tumblr keeps forcing them on me. Sometimes I just have to close tumblr altogether. I don’t care so much about ads when they’re for some stupid clothing brand I don’t care about or insurance or whatever, but showing me a scary gif of scenes from a horror movie against my will is rude. I don’t know why these studios act like they don’t know the difference between showing me gifs of a corny teen comedy I don’t intend to see and throwing gory or supernatural creepy imagery at me and forcing me to see it. I even have tried blocking that movie’s blog, and I still have to see their sponsored content. Please staff do something about this. Allow us to dismiss ads we don’t want to see or close it after a few seconds or something, or allow us to specify what kinds of ads we’re comfortable with. Just as they don’t show horror movie ads on Disney Channel to protect the children.
That’s a good point about the Disney Channel. Tumblr makes a big deal about how young its users are; it’s a sought-after demographic for many advertisers, including horror movies. Tumblr says users have to be at least 13, but the site don’t appear to do anything to enforce that, such that their actual user base probably includes millions of users who are 12 or younger.
Microblogging has only been around a few years, so it doesn’t have the rules that exist on TV and in movie theaters to prevent age-inappropriate ads from being shown to young viewers. The only thing standing in the way of that is the moral sense of Tumblr’s decision-makers. Unfortunately, Tumblr is mostly run by people in their 20s who don’t have kids, and their moral sense appears to have a blind spot in that area.
There are some signs that the situation my be (slowly) getting (slightly) better. These days the ads are usually tagged with #horror. Tumblr added a guideline that advertisers not depict dead bodies. And the latest batch I’ve seen have been toned down; they’re more suggestive than outright horrific. Since Tumblr doesn’t talk about the issue publicly, it’s hard to know if that last development is a new policy or just a choice by the advertiser for a single campaign. But one can hope.
tl;dr: Tumblr’s horror movie ads suck. More here.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/106624846816.
