Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Tumblr founder David Karp and Sequoia partner (and Tumblr investor) Roelof Botha took the stage to talk to TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington about how the blogging platform’s plans to take over the world. After a conversation about the merits of building a startup in New York City versus Silicon Valley, the talk turned to how Tumblr plans to monetize their platform.

What’s going to differentiate Tumblr’s advertising over the big honchos of online advertising? Karp says that, unlike the bigs, Tumblr is going after the “top of the funnel,” in other words, advertising that actually inspires you to go out and buy. That’s all well and good, but is it actually working? “Ten out of ten Hollywood studios are buying advertising space on Tumblr,” Karp says. Tumblr is seeing high six-figures per campaign, and “budgets are starting to ramp up.”

In fact, Tumblr really began its monetization push back in May of last year, when it first launched ads on its network. “We’ve had great early traction on our network,” Karp told Arrington, “because our story stands apart from the other big ad networks out there.”

When Mike asked just what it was that made Tumblr stand out, Karp said that he thinks most of the big networks are really focused on bottom-of-the-funnel intent — that is to say, harvesting intent by hitting viewers with blasts of those little blue links that take them to the website of the “right asbestos attorney.”

New media platforms building ad networks are using intent from demographic targeting, timeliness and other roughshod ways of serving the right ad to users, but really they just end up being a group of little blue links designed to convert. In other words, Karp isn’t exactly a fan of search advertising. Sorry, Google.

Instead, Karp wants Tumblr to offer advertisers their own canvas and the space they need to create ads that will actually win awards, he says, the kind of content that one would find in traditional advertising. “We want to give them the space to do anything, a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama, whatever they need to help them build amazing, interactive ads.”

The problem is that creative brand advertising hasn’t had anywhere to live on the Web, the Tumblr founder says, and the startup wants to build tools to do that — and to build ad space that’s a comfortable fit for social advertising.

Given the fairly nutballs hype surrounding the launch of Mailbox for iPhone (and its crazy queues), you could probably assume that they’d bring the app to other devices and platforms — and you’d be right if you did.

The company recently started letting users know of their upcoming projects: an iPad app is in the works, with Android and desktop clients “on the agenda.”

[Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is an investor in Mailbox by way of CrunchFund. While neither Mike nor anyone else at CrunchFund has ever even mentioned Mailbox to me, I prefer to make these things nice and transparent.]

While Mailbox had mentioned to us that they were tinkering with an iPad app in previous briefings, they’ve only recently begun to mention it in public — and even then, seemingly only through relatively quiet Twitter responses. This is also the first we’re hearing of potential Android/Desktop clients.

@AdamYaffe no ETA yet but the iPad version is coming soon! iCloud and other accounts may be added as we grow !—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 15, 2013

Though there’s seemingly no ETA for any of the above, it would seem that the iPad app is further along in its development than the other aforementioned platforms. While their mentions of the iPad app are frequently detailed as “in the works” or “coming soon,” mentions of the Android/Desktop app are always labeled with the considerably less committal “on the roadmap.”

@bsetter iPad is in the works and desktop is on our roadmap!—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 25, 2013

@1LottoStud No certain timeline yet, but other platforms are coming down the road—including Android!—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 25, 2013

We’ve reached out to the company for clarification on where each project currently sits, and we’ll update if we hear back.

It makes sense that an iPad app would come first. Mailbox is already written for iOS/Cocoa Touch —most of the work would be in adjusting the interface for the bigger screen, unless they add iPad-exclusive features. Porting it to Android, meanwhile, would involve quite a bit more new code. Even porting it to OS X would require a pretty drastic rethinking of the super touch-centric UI, at the very least.

On a side note: I actually stopped using Mailbox a few weeks after installing it. As it strongly focuses on fast actions on individual emails (as opposed to en-masse actions on groups of emails), I found myself paying more attention to preening my inbox than before. I still really dig the time-based reminder future, though.

[Double disclosure, for good measure: see the above disclosure about CrunchFund.]