Marketers: Tumblr photos will now be scanned for branded content

Tumblr just linked with Ditto, advanced image scanning technology, to help corporations cash in on Tumblr users’ trending tastes. Ditto scans images on the web for branded products and sells the results to multi-national companies. For the process to work, Ditto will have complete access to all of Tumblr’s photos.

“Twitter and Instagram have been suppliers of data to us for over a year and we’re able to look on behalf of brands at what the conversation about them looks like through photos,” David Rose, CEO of Ditto, told Motherboard. “What’s different about Tumblr is that they’re supplying us with the entire firehose of all photos that we’re then able to interpret.”

The technology involves is pretty advanced. Ditto’s algorithm identifies products that it’s been trained to recognise via a machine learning process, as well as indicators of emotion. It recognises users’ feelings towards the brand like a smile or a frown. Ditto, through this process, eventually builds maps of product affiliations.