With 74 million daily posts, Tumblr is a big haystack to get lost in. Which is why the company is planning to monetize its mobile product the new old-fashioned way: pay-per-view.

You pay, that is, while others view.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Tumblr VP Derek Gottfrid said that the blogging network has already tested the product internally, will roll it out in the first half of 2013, and is currently looking for advertisers who want to sign up.

That will, he thinks, drive the 162-employee and 100-million-blog Tumblr into profitability this year. Which seems to be a likely goal, even if only a fraction of its 16 billion total page views start being enhanced with the new ego-driven monetization model.

Tumblr, which became the ninth most popular site on the U.S. web in 2012, significantly improved its mobile apps late in the year, including its iPhone app and a new iPad app. But the company did not did not introduce any form of monetization at that time. This new native advertising model will ensure that traditional banner ads don’t clutter the mobile experience, but will present posts to users who might not have intended to see them.

One interesting note that Tumblr’s sales head Lee Brown let slip: Tumblr’s average advertising sale is just under $100,000 … meaning that major brands and enterprises are behind much of the site’s current revenue.

This is once again expanding the native ads landscape. We have Twitter with promoted tweets (which it just startedselling via ad partners), Facebook with promoted posts, and now Tumblr with, perhaps, trending Tumbls.

All that’s needed is Pinterest to introduce promote pins, which I confidently expect sometime in 2013.

One question: where’s WordPress.com and Automattic?

photo credit: matt coats via photopin cc

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