thats to have it featured. like how youtube partnters have theres featured,

If you just tell folks about ya tumblr and its interesting, no problems.

This... is normal, actually. Back when Yahoo was a search engine, there were several small companies that you would pay to get your site boosted up the search ranks. Google, Bing, all the search engines charge for 'featuring', and then there are all the ad services. Paying for to be featured isn't unusual at all.

But still, paying for followers? You dont even get money for having followers! Its cheating the system in a way.