Right now it appears to be limited to one highlighted post per day, and with all purchases on Tumblr they give you the option of donating an additional $1 to EFF, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
Probably due to the novelty of this feature, income will spike and then fade away. Similar to any other startup article appearing on TC. This service will stop being used pretty fast.
The only way I see this service being successful going forward is by providing stats/analytics to users on post views, engagement, post virality, follower stats, etc. If this service is provided together with the $1 highlight feature, I do see a business going forward.
I'll report back in a few days on the results.
FYI here's the post I highlighted: http://getbokeh.tumblr.com/post/16999137678/bokeh-now-in-pub...
It was a site where you could post free press releases. If you liked, you could buy one or more stars for your press release, and the more stars, the closer to the top it sorted.
He bootstrapped in the late 90's without investors, his only co-founder was his wife, he grew it organically and got very profitable, ended up hiring a couple dozen people, and ultimately had a very nice exit.
Still would like them to figure out a way to help bloggers monetize their sites on the platform. That's the rub for bloggers trying to go "professional" through a Tumblr site — all the readers they get through the dashboard are difficult to monetize right now.
Once they figure that out, it's going to be huge.
Here was my cheeky attempt at using it: http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/16980898109/one-dollar
It's a great idea: it's hard to get more "targeted" with ads than content that would have been posted within the community anyway.
If anecdotal evidence is any guide, it seems to have been received really well within Forrst, and the backlog was huge the last time I looked (not enough pageviews to match demand).
But I love the easy integration of donation to good causes. I'll be making a lot of $2 purchases out of impulse, it seems.
