Things with Wings is an online conversations agency. We create conversations. Lift off, no flapping.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Oh Hello Tumblr, didn’t see you there!
On Friday 9th September 2011 Tumblr catapulted itself to a major milestone – its 10 billionth post. Impressive, yes - but when you consider that it was only rolling past 5 billion posts in May, to double its growth in just 4 months, is incredible!
Although Tumblr and Twitter broke out into the social media scene at around the same time – Tumblr suffered a monstrous amount of down time and so hasn’t grown at the same rate as its feathery competitor.
Roll forwards to the present day however and the distance between them is much less vast. Tumblr is now adding more than 40 million posts a day and according to Quantcast, is attracting 72 millions visitors a month.
What really demands attention though, is the number of page views Tumblr is racking up… More than Wikipedia and also more than its feathery competitor (well kind of)! According to ComScore, Twitter generates 3.4 billions page views and Tumblr generates 6.5 billion a month. Although we have to remember, many Tweets are viewed via an app, meaning these stats are not exactly like for like.
So, where’s this momentum come from?
It’s good to share and the world knows this - every gadget and every piece of social media allows you to share, be it your location, your opinion, the photo of your friend falling down drunk at a party or one of coolest pieces of design you’ve ever encountered. Tumblr neatly fills the gap between short and sweet twitter and a full-blown blog - and as the pace of life continues to quicken, Tumblr allows you to share anything, as easily and as quickly as possible.
“Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog.”
(http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tumblr)
Tumblr allows you to share: text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from your browser, phone, desktop and email. Posts can also be liked, you can follow other Tumblrs and you can completely customise the design and domain of your Tumblr profile - You own the copyright to your own work too. The key point of difference though, is this blogging platform allows you to reblog – much like the beloved retweet.
Historically, Tumblr has been associated with a younger demographic, however Quantcast has just presented findings that 44% of Tumblr’s US users are actually over 35. Interestingly the male/female split is surprisingly even as well - 51/49 % respectively. (http://www.quantcast.com/tumblr.com)
With $85 million of funding in the post to Mr Tumble from the likes of Richard Branson, Greylock and Sequoia Capital, and with a current valuation of $800 million, we’re really excited to see where Tumblr will be in 12 months time.
