The rise of tumblr

Feb 21, 2011 by Dirk Singer

Over at Rabbit (the day job), we’ve just switched over to Tumblr.   Rather than use Tumblr to host a scrapbook somewhere outside our main website, we’ve used it to house the site itself making us (we think) one of the first European agencies to have done so.

And so, as this site is all about stats it seems appropriate to put forward some Tumblr themed ones.

Tumblr of course isn’t new.    Time Magazine listed it as one of its top fifty websites as far back as 2007.    However, in particular over the past six months it has gained a lot of traction.

According to Comscore’s 2010 US digital year in review, Tumblr was on 6.7 million US users in December which is still small compared to Twitter (23.6 million US users), LinkedIn (30 million users) or even the shrinking MySpace (50 million users).   However that represents growth of 128%.

Looking at Alexa, Tumblr is actually ahead of MySpace, ranking no.59 in the top 500 website list, with MySpace at no.65 (via SocialMediaNz).   And Compete similarly has Tumblr up from 3.9 million unique visitors in January 2010 to 10 million by the end of the year.

At the same time, Tumblr boss David Karp told Techcrunch that they are currently gaining an incredible quarter of a billion impressions a week.

David Karp says that the social element of Tumblr is key to that with 65% of page views coming from people looking at their Tumblr dashboard and jumping over to sites that they’ve previously said they liked.

What sectors are driving that growth?  Media and fashion, with consumer brands being by and large fairly slow to adopt the lite blogging platform.

In (city guide website) Black Book earlier this month, Chris Mohney wrote, “For reasons I’m still not sure I really grasp, big brands have been really slow to adopt Tumblr…regular consumer brands that otherwise can’t get their pants off fast enough for Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare have been a little skittish around the general anarchy and bloggy generalities of Tumblr.”

However an article on Flavorwire ‘Brands on Tumblr, the good, the bad and the ugly’ lists several, profiling EMI Music, Comedy Central, IBM’s Smarter Planet. and Standard Hotels.

We’ve got more on Tumblr and why we decided to make the switch over at The Rabbit Feed, our weekly email newsletter.  And no, I am not changing this site from wordpress to Tumblr – not just yet anyway!

Related articles

• (Founder Stories) Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don’t Work For Most People (techcrunch.com)
• Fashion Bloggers Move to the Front (online.wsj.com)
• Tumblr founder says that users who complain about site issues should “go away” (thenextweb.com)
• Tumblr Is Becoming Fashion HQ For The Internet (kwiksocial.com)