Tumblr Ads

About

Tumblr Ads refer to online advertisements on Tumblr which gained notoriety in 2018 for their bizarre, surreal nature.

Origin

While it's unclear as to when exactly Tumblr began seeing the proliferation of surreal ads, one of the earliest popular posts compiling such advertisements was posted September 26th, 2017 by user loki-llaufeyson,^[2] gaining over 168,000 notes (examples shown below).

Spread

Over the course of 2018, many popular posts screenshotting Tumblr's bizarre ads grew popular on the platform.
A blog devoted to the strange ads, ads-the-series,^[1] launched on January 13th, 2018 (first post shown below, left). Another, weird-ads-on-tumblr^[3] launched May 16th (first post shown below, right).

Other popular posts highlighting strange ads include a post by blog weirdness-is-good that gained over 73,000 notes (shown below, left). Another by user zampl gained over 18,000 notes. The surrealness of the ads continues to be a popular topic on Tumblr.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References