A few days ago there was big news that Tumblr surpassed WordPress in number of blogs. It was pretty damn astounding, since Tumblr went from 7 million to 27 million blogs in a matter of six months. It was also a sensationalistic headline since it doesn’t take into account the huge number of blogs using WordPress software rather than being hosted on WordPress.com. That would include the likes of the New York Times.
So what accounts for Tumblr’s growth? Well, it’s very simple to use, is well integrated into mobile devices so you can blog on the move, and there’s easy sharing. That makes for a very low barrier to adoption. However, there are two things that are special about it to me.
The first is it’s strikingly visual nature. That appeals to me and has probably helped a lot in Tumblr’s popularity among fashion and lifestyle bloggers. The templates, even the free ones, have a great aesthetic.
The second is the social nature of it. It’s a visual Twitter, with longer and multimedia content. Following and reblogging is integral to the platform. And it’s all public as opposed to Facebook. It’s an interesting middle ground that has caught fire.
A couple of notable people have switched from WordPress to using Tumblr, like Steve Rubel. I don’t’ see that for me. I see it as a place to put thoughts or content I would make public on Facebook to have broader exposure and conversation. But it’s free of Facebook’s platform and restrictions. It’s a newsfeed like Twitter, but harder for me to fit into a busy day. There are not tools to aggregate the newsfeed like those that exist for Twitter and Facebook, so it requires more direct attention – which I don’t have a lot of bandwidth for. However, you can automatically cross-post to other platforms which makes it an interesting home for more visual content you would expose to the world and link to from either Facebook or Twitter depending on the flavor of it.
With apologies to Culture Club, I’ll Tumbl for Ya. (Half of Tumblr’s users were probably born after their first album.)
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It’s impressive to see that since this post was created, the number of posts has doubled !