“Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” Mayer said. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp wasn’t on the morning’s call: He was at an all-team meeting. (“Instead of calling his all-company meetings ‘all-hands,’ he calls them ‘all-team,’”Mayer noted. “I think in the future we’ll call meetings at Yahoo ‘all-team’ meetings.”)

“When you look at the best and most-successful billion-dollar acquisitions in the tech space — eBay and Paypal, Google and YouTube — there’s a meme that emerges,” Mayer said. “The best acquisitions…allow the two brands and the two products and services to evolve somewhat separately.”

Yahoo has “well over” 700 million users, Mayer said, while Tumblr has 300 million — but these audiences overlap so little that the companies can count their combined user base at over a billion.

The difference in user demographics, Mayer acknowledged, means there’s “a type of user that will always prefer Tumblr and may never come to Yahoo” — and that’s fine. Yahoo can “provide search seamlessly in the background” for Tumblr, but it could be existing and future Yahoo users that benefit most from the Tumblr acquisition: “As we pull Tumblr content into our news feeds and our media experiences, it will cause the core Yahoo properties to become that much more interesting and that much richer,” leading more users to the site even if they are from “very different [demographic] profiles from people coming to Tumblr.”

Tumblr users should get ready for more ads

Tumblr will remain a separate site, but that doesn’t mean its users won’t notice a few changes — particularly on the advertising front. “There’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that’s meaningful and really additive to the user experience,” Mayer said. Tumblr is already including a few ads in its dashboard, but ”we would like to look at that and understand how we can introduce ads — a very light ad load where the impact is really created because the ads fit the user’s expectation and follow the form and function of the dashboard.”

In addition, Mayer said that Yahoo might allow individual Tumblr users to enable ads on their blogs, “but that would always be done with the blogger’s permission.”

So what about Tumblr CEO Karp’s well-known dislike of advertising? “David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

So, uh, what about Flickr?

In 2005, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing service Flickr. That acquisition, long before Mayer’s time, is widely viewed as a big failure — one that ruined the Flickr experience because Yahoo tried to integrate it, then largely abandoned it.

On Monday afternoon, though, Yahoo is expected to announce updates to Flickr. Could we see a resurgence in that platform, as part of Yahoo’s new “don’t-screw-it-up” acquisition philosophy? Mayer was cautious: “In terms of how Tumblr evolves, it really depends on the creators,” she said. But when it comes to Flickr, “I think it is noteworthy that a lot of the posts on Tumblr are graphical. There’s some obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr, in that regard,” and it’s “probably something we’ll turn our attention to in the future. Flickr could provide great storage for albums or slideshows, things like that. We’ll see.”

For those yet to be (p)interested: Pinterest is a virtual pinboard for displaying, planning and organising collections of information found on other web pages, like a scrapbook. It is grabbing 11.7 million U.S. eyeballs each month, according to comScore. And early data shows Pinterest’s pins, like acupuncture’s, can bring welcome health benefits for publishers…

• It has already become a top social giver of traffic, ahead of Facebook, for magazines like Martha Stewart, Cooking Light, Elle Décor, House Beautiful and Country Living, according to publishers and third-party data.
• Real Simple is also amongst the magazines getting more traffic from Pinterest than Facebook
• It has even overtaken Twitter as a referral-giver, according to Shareaholic, which says Pinterest also refers more clicks than Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Plus, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and YouTube combined.

Some media owners are making experimental efforts to find their own value…

• Homes & Garden magazine has devised a ‘Pin and Win‘ competition that actively seeks engagement with readers through co-curration.
• Time, Wall Street Journal and other more niche publications have also started pinning to various boards, but most seem overly self-promotional. Showing off newspaper front pages? There’s already a site for that.
• Site design inspiration seems to be trending this way. There’s more than a passing resemblance to Pinterest in the recent overhauls given to the Easy Living magazine site and the Stylecaster site.

Yet, with all the promise, and despite plenty of hype, most media outlets so far are pin-shy.

Clear legal issues remain around Pinterest, which lets users re-post publishers’ material including photos to the site. One could forgive publishers their caution in embracing Pinterest while this fact persists. In recent weeks, Pinterest has moved to allay concerns. But there is still a long way to go, and not just on Pinterest’s side – media operators should move forward, too.

My advice?

1. Turn Abuse To Advantage

It’s time for publishers to get useful and remember who they are there for. As with all platforms you borrow space on, it’s how you use it, not how it uses you.

If they brokered a deal with Pinterest that allowed re-use of their material, news publishers, as the copyright owners to much of the site’s content, could walk away with a traffic bonanza.

2. Court Women

The site’s overwhelming female bias (83 percent of U.S. users, according to DoubleClick Ad Planner) could be a big draw for advertisers, since women are the primary purchasers in many households.

There’s a huge opportunity to monetise this pin-happy, online shopping savvy crowd that has yet to be explored. If three Ferraris can be sold every month via the eBay app, I’m sure we can sell a few of most things using pins and a PC.

3. Think Visually

I look at platforms like Pinterest (and there are now many) and I see massive potential for the news industry – not just new distribution opportunities but also potential new revenue streams, ways to connect with readers, customer research and perhaps even a whole new evolution of storytelling itself.

Users are busy, visual creatures. The challenge is no longer enticing them to read, it’s getting them to engage and discover in new ways.

There are huge considerations to think about with current page real-estates – after all, pictures take up more space than words. As tablet adoption grows, swipe, pinch and zoom gestures beg to be exploited by publishers. Pinterest’s photo-centric approach is straight out of the iPad UI playbook.

4. Go Beyond The Story

Is your journalist writing about Mad Men? Why not create a board from which users can buy everything they need for a night out with Don Draper? Perhaps pin up more photos than your piece had room for, maybe some exclusive content.

Maybe link back to an RSS search for all previous articles mentioning Mad Men? Why not create exclusive boards for users to purchase the DVDs through? Perhaps offer a coupon for the items you’ve pinned because you worked out a deal with the supplier beforehand. Could every board be an opportunity to drive new Twitter followers, new Facebook fans and (gulp) new subscribers?

Here is my Pinterest board to accompany this story.

One thing is certain – there is a clearly emerging aesthetic in online media towards discovery versus search, and toward grid interfaces instead of streams, as platforms deliver information more visually to drive up engagement.

Whether it is Facebook’s Timeline, huge blog template headers, Google+’s oversized photo posts or Twitter’s Pinned Tweet it just seems publishing isn’t quite ready to create stories in this way because of their text-centric nature. Using Easy Living as an example, outlets must learn to develop a competency in delivering information in this way.

It’s unlikely that every story could or should be Pinterested. But could a board act like a self-contained unit of information? A sort of quick-hit Storify? Is it the morning product so many commuters crave?

Pinterest’s growth, at least in the short term, looks to be on a hockey-stick curve. News won’t be replaced by Pinterest and its ilk any time soon, but it could learn a couple of tricks from it.

Paul Armstrong is the creator of @themediaisdying, he is currently Head of Social at Mindshare. You can follow him on Twitter here (@munkyfonkey).

This article originally appeared in Mindshare.

But before you think that Subscribe has been taken over by those working in the world of blogs and digital-first news sites, think again. According to a blog post today, Facebook said that among those early adopters, the highest concentration of journalists using Subscribe were from two of the most old-school publications: Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) has more than 90 journalists using it; and The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) has over 50.

Anecdotally, people have said they are finding a lot more people are following them on Facebook than they are on Twitter. That’s not so strange: although Twitter has become the default place that many journalists hang out online today, Facebook is fundamentally a much bigger site: 300 million versus 800 million subscribers, respectively. The only surprise, given how much traffic Facebook generates for some sites, is that more journalists aren’t using it as a way to reach readers, or would-be readers. That might be because some see Facebook as a down-time activity, compared to Twitter as a work-time network. (I know I do.)

So Facebook may have a roster of thousands of engaged journalists to canvas, but it took a selection of only 25 to draw some early conclusions on how journalists are using Subscribe. Does that sound like a small number? “When it comes to qualitative, it’s enough to draw conclusions and see patterns,” Vadim Lavrusik, Journalist Program Manager & Betsy Cameron, Data Analyst, wrote in response to one person’s questioning of the sample size.

Some early take-aways from that group of 25. There will likely be some that have seen significantly different results.

– The average journalist has seen a 320 percent increase in his/her traffic since November 2011.
– People are finding journalists via friends in their news feeds (for example, through shared articles); Facebook search and Facebook’s own recommended subscriber list.
– Links are good: 62 percent of posts contain a link, and when posts have some analysis with the link, that triggers 20 percent more referral traffic.
– Questions are better: 25 percent of posts ask a question, and Facebook said that an earlier study that found posts that asked for input received 64 percent more responses from users — although those might not be click-throughs and just simple likes.
– Self-promotion actually works: 30 percent of posts contain calls to action such as “read this.” Those receive 37 percent more engagement than those without the self-promotion. Asking reads to comment also got good responses: between two and three times more engagement from subscribers.
– So do photos: surprisingly only 12 percent of posts were based around photos — but those that used them got 50 percent more “likes.” Again, no detail on how that actually translated into people reading those posts, if those posts also included links to stories.
– Videos are equally less common — only 13 percent of posts feature them.

The analysts say that mobile investments accounted for 42.4 percent of all technology investment in 2011 — or $6.3 billion for mobile startups in a year where, overall, venture capital investment in technology totaled $14.9 billion.

That’s a record proportion for the sector, and a massive spike on 2010, when mobile represented 30.4 percent of all tech investments worldwide, or $6.1 billion of investment. (See table at end of post.)

Ironically, while mobile is representing the greatest amount of investment, $6.3 billion falls just short of the biggest-ever year for mobile investment: that honor goes to 2006, when VCs pumped $6.4 billion into mobile technology.

Drilling down: As for the single-biggest category for investment in 2011, it’s consumer applications that have won the day — a sign of how the smartphone boom is leading to a big rise in the amount of companies rushing in to service those new consumers, and a subsequent rush of money men scrambling to finance them and get a piece of the action.

While no single consumer application made it into the top-10 mobile investments of 2011, the sum total of all the investments in the category pushed the total number of consumer applications investments to $1.33 billion.

Media infrastructure was the second-largest category for investment with some $900 million put into companies working in the category (services like mobile advertising are part of this latter group). Collectively, infrastructure was the biggest sector receiving VC money.

Infrastructure covers a diverse range of mobile-related startups, from mobile advertising (InMobi’s $200 million from Softbank being the second-largest deal of 2011), to technology used in backhaul and radio towers (Tower Cloud’s $155 million, and Eaton Towers’ $150 million respectively in these categories).

While consumers apps didn’t make the top 10, plenty of them made the top 20. The biggest of them all was for a service that is disrupting more traditional telecoms business: video calling service Tango picked up $50.7 million. Swiftly behind that was note-taking application maker Evernote, news aggregation site Flipboard, and check-in darling Foursquare — each picking up $50 million. Further along, Angry Birds maker Rovio picked up $42 million and photo sharing company Color picked up $41 million.

All these companies certainly saw a lot of attention in the last year, and they all cover hugely different areas of services. But one of them, Color, has already had to make a major pivot, losing one of its key founders in the process, and it’s still unclear what will happen with it next. Similarly, while Evernote has had a huge amount of attention for its core, note-taking app, the follow-up services have made significantly less impact on the mobile public.

Mobile is certainly a volatile area, with more than a little of a tech-bubble feel to it: Which of these, do you think, will be able to sustain their momentum and become profitable businesses in the years ahead?

Worth pointing out that this is not just the case for consumer apps, though: the single-biggest VC investment in mobile this year went to LightSquared, the LTE startup that picked up $265 million from a consortium of investors. The company is still trying to build out a network for its services, hence the huge capital buy-in. However, there are still big question marks over what will happen: the most recent report is that Carl Icahn has picked up $300 million in LightSquared debt, perhaps in anticipation of the company being unable to get its services off the ground after some regulatory hurdles around spectrum interference.

Sequoia Capital was the biggest VC in 2011, making 24 investments including several in mobile apps and media services. They included Bubble Motion, Bump, Clickatell, Color, Cotendo, DailyBooth, Evernote, Flite, Inkling, Inkling, Just Dial, MeLLmo, Meraki, MobileIron, MoboTap, Onavo, Quantenna, Sencha, Sourcebits, Square, Stoke, Synapsense, Trippy and Unity.

Rutberg also notes that more than one in five of all VC investments this year were strategic investments: those buy-ins made by companies like Intel (NSDQ: INTC) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) that might potentially acquire the companies or use their services in the years ahead.

A couple of other notable points from Rutberg’s numbers: investments in mobile advertising services increased nearly five-fold last year: to $592 million from $128 million in 2010; and mobile payments investments more than doubled to $558 million from $276 million in 2010.

How does all this stack up for 2012? Mobile will continue to figure big: “We expect mobile to continue to be significant percentage within venture overall,” says Rajeev Chand, MD and head of research for Rutberg, but the fate of upcoming IPOs will also play a role. “Right now growth of overall venture is uncertain, depending upon how tech IPOs play out and what impact that has to late stage pre-IPO financings.”

UK-based Michael Ohajuru, who on Twitter describes himself as a “sales and marketing specialist, art blogger, communications evangelist, art historian, communications philosopher [and] geek social networker,” among other things, notes that, after starting to use SkyDrive to store and share photographs with a closed group of contacts, he discovered one day that his account had stopped working.

When he appealed to Microsoft for an explanation, a representative, Kayla, sent him an example picture that led to his account getting frozen. It was a “Reclining nude,” a painting by Amedeo Modigliani from 1917, from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a picture he took in London. Apparently, it violated Microsoft’s Code of Conduct, which forbids any image that “depicts nudity of any sort.”

The case echos a recent a mini-kerfuffle when Google (NSDQ: GOOG) removed the avatar of one well-known blogger because, in his picture, he was giving us “the finger.”

Ohajuru was confused about whether it was actually that one picture, or others like it. So he took to his photographs, discovering not only other paintings with nudity, but photos from beach holidays (lots of skin) and at least one other graphic work of art, piece of decorative art called the “Warren cup” with two men in an embrace (also naked, or are they nude?).

Were all these pictures also unacceptable to Microsoft, or just the one Modigliani? Pondering the question, Ohajuru — being of both artistic and technological inclinations — thought of an ironic parallel: “What Kayla and Microsoft have done, today, in 2012, was a almost an exact repetition of what happened when Amedeo Modigliani first exhibited his now acclaimed nudes in 1917, according to Modigliani’s Wikipedia entry.” He continues:

“Then:

On December 3, 1917, Modigliani’s first one-man exhibition opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery. The chief of the Paris police was scandalized by Modigliani’s nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening.

Now, to paraphrase Wikipedia

On January 8, 2012 Modigliani’s Reclining Nude, 1917 was uploaded by me to my SkyDrive. Microsoft was scandalized by Modigliani’s nude and forced me to delete the file within 48 hours.”

Rather than delete all those other pictures, Ohajuru took a calculated risk, and took away just the “Reclining nude,” replacing it with another image (this is a bit of classic art censorship protest, and also reminiscent of MG Siegler taking away his middle finger, and adding in a cute Google+ logo):

It worked, and now the account is up again.

Does that make sense? It doesn’t to me. Ohajuru’s conclusion, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” is certainly the case here — as is the fact that, as he notes, “Microsoft’s Code of Conduct policy confuses naked with nude.” One being objectifying, and the other being artistic.

But shouldn’t we expect a bit more from technology today? Given how many other images there were in Ohajuru’s SkyDrive that didn’t make Kayla and Microsoft flinch, the incident highlights not only the question of whether whether automatic image systems can be honed to differentiate between art and porm — but also the inconsistencies of such systems. If they work like this, they’re simply just ridiculous and pointless.

Pinterest’s traffic is high enough to move it into Experian’s top 10 social networking & forums category, along with sites like Facebook, YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and Twitter. Pinterest had 31.7 million unique visitors in November 2011.

The site’s users are predominantly adult females: 58 percent are women, 59 percent between the ages of 25 and 44. While Pinterest and other sites in the social networking category both receive their highest share of visits from users in California and Texas, Experian found “the Social Networking category as a whole over-indexes on share of visits from Northeastern states while Pinterest over-indexes on visits from the states in the Northwest and Southeast. This data indicates that Pinterest visitors have a different profile versus their counterparts visiting other social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube.”

Not surprisingly, Experian found Pinterest users are also more likely to be interested in hobbies and crafts than the rest of the online population. Those who visit both hobbies and crafts websites and Pinterest tend to be “baby boomers and young adults who are heavy web users who spend time on house and garden, sports and fitness, and family-oriented websites.”

Pinterest is technically invite-only, but you just request an invitation on the site and you’ll be added in a couple weeks. Or e-mail me if you want an invitation, I promise you’ll like it no matter what state you live in.

full report

BuzzFeed said its mobile traffic increased “tenfold” in 2011. In a statement that could have been written by Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti says, “The new BuzzFeed Kindle Fire app provides an even better experience than our site. You get the BuzzFeed front page, our Hot List ranking the biggest stories on the web, and effortless content sharing — all with a responsiveness that is impossible to reproduce in a browser or any other device on the market.” The “Hot List” feature is exclusive to the Kindle Fire app and the content is optimized for a 7-inch screen.

BuzzFeed also has Android and iPhone apps.

BuzzFeed says it has 30 million monthly unique visitors and that mobile traffic increased “tenfold” in 2011. The company made news last week when it hired Politico’s Ben Smith as editor-in-chief. Smith will expand the site’s editorial coverage, hire reporters and launch new sections.

The Food app is essentially designed like a diary or blog template, and lets users create entries based around specific meals. They can upload pictures, get their locations automatically detected, and write down meal descriptions and recipes as part of the entry. All these elements can be left for your own private perusal, either through Evernote’s web app or through its apps; and they can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter and email.

Meanwhile, Evernote Hello works as a kind of interactive, dynamic Rolodex: it lets you record people’s faces, names and associations, as well as more basic contact details like email and phone numbers — with a quirky suggestion to allow people to photograph themselves with your phone if you trust them enough. If you get email addresses, then your details automatically get sent to them. The contacts you enter in Evernote Hello get stored in a database that you can then use to enhance with further meetings with those people (like a Salesforce service for the masses).

One drawback that I can see right away is that it’s not clear whether any of that information synchronises with your contact book on the phone itself; it looks like potentially you might end up with duplicate entries on your device for some people, as you do with other social networking apps.

Another drawback that applies to both of these apps is that they sound a lot like the food and productivity apps on the market today, which could make takeup challenging for the company.

On the plus side, what sets these apart is how Evernote will be combining their functionality to create something a little more powerful: the idea, it seems, is that someone using Evernote Hello might also be the kind of person who would open Evernote Food to record a meal and maybe also take a few notes using the main Evernote app. Evernote then takes these encounters are merges them in a kind of timeline to let users add more context to, say, a particular meeting with a person.

Used together, the apps make for a compelling — and, in this world of me-too apps, a more unique — approach to the idea of recording one’s life in a way that is more private, and in some respects more useful than, say, via Facebook, Twitter or Path.

In June 2011, Evernote announced that it had 10 million users signed up to its services, which gives it a respectable base from which to build out these new products. It will be worth watching whether Evernote picks up more users as a result of Food and Hello, and whether this is a sign of more vertical apps to come. As both apps are currently free, it will also be worth watching how Evernote eventually gets around to monetizing the offerings.

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The Timeline redesign will likely be jarring to Facebook’s famously change-averse users, but Zuckerberg and Facebook director of product management Chris Cox said that the idea was to allow people to create virtual scrapbooks of their lives through Facebook. Users will be able to sort their Timelines by certain pieces of content, such as clicking on button that will display all the photos taken of you in the last year. The new Timeline will be rolling out over the next several weeks, and it will be the home for a new set of social applications.

Facebook users are familiar with social games that allow them to brag about their progress or collaborate with their Facebook friends on certain achievements, but they’ll now be able to share other types of activity like the music they’re listening to or the “lifestyle” accomplishments in their lives, such as running five miles or visiting a new restaurant. Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Nike, Foodspotting, and Spotify are among the partners who will have applications based on the new version of Facebook’s Open Graph, which allows developers to build social applications on top of Facebook’s technology.

Zuckerberg also announced a recent milestone for the company: 500 million people used Facebook on a single day recently. The company also updated the overall number of people using Facebook to 800 million.