Hi Leo. (screencap)

Fire up your Tumblr mobile app this afternoon, and you'll notice something new in the river of posts flowing through your dashboard. Scroll through and for the first time, you'll see advertising mixed in with the #RHOA GIFs and nail art.

Ad Age reports that starting today, the profit-seeking startup is rolling out sponsored posts in the prime real estate of users' streams, though only on mobile apps. Launch partners include G.E., Warner Bros. and ABC, and at most you'll see four per day, identified with a little dollar sign.

Of course, this is Tumblr, so a brand can't simply shell out a quarter mil for a banner and call it a day. These are sponsored posts, just like what you'd see in the Tumblr Radar, so they have to link back to a larger Tumblr presence. But this is a far more visible product than what's been available until now.

Ad Age says:

"'This mobile advertising opportunity is native to how our consumers experience content on our apps; as a continuous stream,' said Tumblr head of sales Lee Brown, in a statement."

Maybe that's why G.E. and Warner Bros both launched their campaigns with--duh--GIFs. Never not GIFs.

(Photo: The Atlantic)

If you're into bloodsports, there's another way to watch Obama v. Romney tonight. Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed startup that lets you live-stream network TV, just offered New Yorkers two hours of free viewing tonight from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m--and free viewing for both subsequent presidential debates. Users don't have to input their credit card information, but they do have to own a Mac since the service still only works through Safari browsers.

For those of you outside Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, there are a number of other options.

YouTube is live-streaming both the presidential and vice presidential debates for the first time ever, via both YouTube’s Election Hub and ABC News’s YouTube channel. C-SPAN is also live-streaming the rhetorical sparring match.

And if you miss cable's wailing of the partisan banshees to tell you how you're supposed to feel about the assorted sound bites, well, there's always Twitter.

Birds do it, bees do it, portals up in silly trees do it

Earlier this week Yahoo announced a major integration with ABC. The struggling internet portal finds its stock in the gutter, its internal management in shambles and bankers circling like vultures to break it into pieces they can sell off to the highest bidder. The one thing Yahoo still has in spades is a massive audience.

What's really interesting, however, is that ABC is not just interested in connecting with the vast number of eyeballs Yahoo can send from its 25 million daily visitors. It's also intrigued by the kind of social traffic that the big news networks are keen on tapping into. As The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal points out:

Here at the Washington Ideas Forum, the heads of ABC, NBC, and CBS took to the stage for a panel moderated by our James Fallows. Alongside the discussions of international reportage and the politicization of news, ABC president Ben Sherwood provided an interesting rationale for his outfits expanded partnership with Yahoo. Here's the thing. As explained by Sherwood, the deal was not an effort to reach (large) Yahoo's audience per se.

Yahoo, he said, was the largest provider of news items that were shared on Twitter and Facebook. Ergo, "If we are the primary news provider to Yahoo, we'll be the primary news provider on Facebook and Twitter," Sherwood said.

What Yahoo needs is a clear path forward. Embracing its role as portal and building out better tools and analytics for the news properties to which it drives so many visitors doesn't sound like a bad plan. Better than trying, and failing repeatedly, to build its own brand of original content that connects with an audience advertisers will pay a premium for.

“If we ask somebody on the street, ‘What’s the top news brand?’ Would they say Yahoo news?” Mickie Rosen, the senior vice president who oversees Yahoo’s media properties, told the NY Times. “The honest answer is they probably wouldn’t.”

Birds of a feather...

Hulu users who don't pay for the site's premium version won't be enjoying any content from Fox the morning after. Starting today, all Fox shows will be kept off the web for eight days, unless users subscribe to Hulu Plus or prove they pay for Dish Network. Peter Kafka reports that Disney's ABC will be the next major network to put this kind of delay in place.

As Disney chief Bob Iger explained on a recent conference call, most of the network's revenue still comes from the cable companies, and keeping them happy means giving them exclusives the web doesn't have. Here's a transcript of Mr. Iger from Seeking Alpha:

The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it.

Our overall approach of late has been to make deals that increase revenue, while at the same time, protect and respect basically the multichannel or the channel distribution value that we see today. So, we’re looking at deals that are largely library in nature, meaning very little if any content that would be in season, mostly prior season. But also, trying to build into at least some of these deals, some form of authentication, [that] … will allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window, if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.

You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.

Betabeat is of the opinion that the networks that opt to sacrifice some of the revenue from the incumbent cable players now, in exchange for establishing themselves as the fastest, most social, most viral presence on the web, will be the dominant players in five to ten years time. But maybe that's why we run a tech blog, and not a public company.