9 times out of 10, when people are looking to put out a blog, they decide to go with WordPress. However over the past year or so, I have seen a number of sites who have chosen to make their blogs using Tumblr.

Tumblr, a micro-blogging site, has an option that allows you to assign a CNAME to your Tumblr account, so that you can have it live on your own domain as your entire site or as a sub-domain.

I even played around with using a CNAME to create a site for the domain Burento.com, which I bought a long time back. I, like many others, did not sign up to have a Tumblr profile specifically, but rather to use Tumblr as a blog platform for my domain.

After running fine for about 2 years, my account started getting suspended for some reason a couple months ago. I would email them about it and why it was suspended, and I would get the same response each time:

We’ve restored your content.

Thank you for bringing this problem to our attention. We’re sorry that it occurred, and we’ll do our best to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

After probably 5 times having the account suspended, I asked them if they could let me know what was causing the account to be suspended in the first place, since I would prefer to stop doing whatever they did not like, rather than getting my account fixed every other week.

Finally today I got a response saying that the issue ‘stems from having a blog that resembles spam. Because all of your posts are of the same media type…’

Now I do have some auto-updated content on the page from a number of my sites, as they all relate to what the blog is about and it was definitely not spam.

So I decided I would go ahead and stop the auto-updating content I had and just focus on only the manual updates for the page, but when I went to the page, it was still suspended… again…

This time I got a completely different response to my inquiry about why it was suspended again so quickly.

We’ve terminated your Tumblr account at http://burento.com. As per the policies you agreed to when creating a Tumblr account, we do not allow affiliate marketing on Tumblr.

Now for starters, I am not an affiliate marketer, so it is not like I am publishing a bunch of affiliate links or similar content, but I had been updating products I thought were cool from the site ThisIsWhyImBroke.com, which has affiliate tags in their updates, as that is how they make money on the site. (Phenominal site by the way)

So apparently if you have a Tumblr driven site, on your own domain, and functioning as your own site or blog, you are not allowed to update that blog with any content that might contain an affiliate link at all. 

Don’t get me wrong, Tumblr is a free service and they have every right to enforce whatever silly rules they want to, just as you have a choice in whether to use them to run your site or not.

I just wanted to shed light on this for others who might be considering running a site using a Tumblr account.

In short, don’t!

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