Tumblr, one of the companies that significantly lowered the bar for starting a blog, has just raised $4.5 million in a Series B round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, the same investors that put in $750,000 in the first round. CEO David Karp says the investment will give the startup a runway of at least two and a half years, and is introducing paid features at the same time.
Furthermore, former Time Warner technology SVP (and current CEO of Betaworks) John Borthwick is joining the board, while former CNET director John Maloney will act as the New York-based company’s President.
Tumblr serves zero ads on its pages, and generated an equal amount of dollars so far. Now, Tumblr will have premium services to make up for that, although it’s unclear what the services will be exactly. Karp did mention they were gonna be ’sexy’, so we’re moderately curious now.
In a release, Tumblr is claimed to have over 15 million monthly unique visitors, but those numbers sound a bit inflated if you ask us. ComScore measures 1.5 million global unique visitors in October, a 300 percent increase from a year ago (see chart). Nonetheless, it had great momentum from the moment it launched in 2007, and there’s still a lot of potential users out there. If they will continue to come, and if they will be able to make the company profitable, remains to be seen.
saf
Sexy is indeed a business model.
Yeah who knew, right?
I love Tumblr – congrats guys! 15M isn’t surprising given the number of tumblogs out there.
I started actively using Tumblr a month ago, and have become addicted.
It’s actually a lot like Twitter the way they’ve designed the dashboard – but it’s all about the content. The follower/following motivation is the same as Twitter too. Getting an explicit follower base adds a game mechanic and motivates posts even with just a few followers. That makes it a much more sticky blogging platform.
Here is my tumblog: http://giantrobotlasers.com
F- Yes!
Tumblr rocks!!!
I use tumblr as well. Ended up integrating my WP and Tumblr together in one interface on my personal website.
Congrats Tumblr team, you deserve it!
I started blogging using Blogger, then Wordpress, but was still not satisfied with either. After a lot of research, I am on Tumblr now and I am glad I did.
Regarding your comment about the discrepancy in visitor data, could it be that Tumblr may be including blogs like mine at jay.iproceed.com (technically it should be included even though because my blog is running from Tumblr servers despite the fact that I have my own domain and I get credit for this traffic when I sell my advertising) in their stats while ComScore will not because it is on another domain.
Happy about this news. Although i haven’t updated my Tumblr in awhile, I really do like the service ;)
Congratulations to the tumblr team and investors! I’ve been using tumblr for just over a year and it’s really incorporated itself into my daily life. Can’t wait to be able to give them some of my money!
Also, the 15M number doesn’t seem unreasonable. If they aren’t there yet, they will be soon.
A couple months ago there was a meme “What’s your tumblr user number?” going around, and the growth curve was looking pretty healthy.
http://blog.dar...r-tumblr-number
I don’t think that number sounds inflated at all. People are getting addicted to this awesome service and I suspect the word-of-mouth effect is getting more and more people to sign up.
As cliché as it sounds, Tumblr is one its way to becoming the next MySpace/Facebook.
wow you must worked pr there.
Just FYI, the disconnect between comScore tracking of Tumblr.com and David’s reported stats is connected to the fact that domain mapping is a popular (and free) feature on Tumblr. Many people map their own domain to their tumblelog, and as a result, comScore no longer credits Tumblr with the traffic to those domain mapped tumblelogs.
Full disclosure, I work at Union Square Ventures, an investor in Tumblr.
+1 for your technical insight, +1 for investing & re-investing in Tumblr ;-)
Andrew, we know there’s often a disconnect between comScore and actual numbers, and we realize not all Tumblr blogs get accounted for, but the reported numbers still sound inflated.
http://www.tech...go-all-the-way/
I don’t think ANY Tumblr blogs are accounted for. They’re all on subdomains. Those graphs only represent Dashboard traffic.
One of the reasons the numbers might be off is that a.) ComScore is a POS and b.) Tumblr lets you use your own domain. If I change my tumblr to “tumblr.joestump.net” then ComScore doesn’t count that as traffic to “tumblr.com”.
–Joe
Joe, tell us how you really feel about comscore. :)
Wow, another great example of a horrid domain name. Think how much traffic is going to tumbler.com.
Global unique numbers is one thing but I think it’s more important to focus on the type of user base Tumblr has collected. The Tumblr platform and the dashboard marries the best attributes of other platforms: it’s easy to post and encourages quick hits of content like Twitter, it allows posting of a variety of content like blog platforms, and the Dashboard has many social features like reblog, “like”, group blogging, and follower counts that engages users for longer periods of time. Dare I say it, I think it even rivals Facebook for stickiness and continuous attention span.
Spam fest! Jump right in.
Wow, no one hating on a pre-revenue web2 company getting a nice round?
…Checks to see if this is still Techcrunch…
Has everyone gotten smart and realized really great business are becoming part of the social fabric of the Internet? Has everyone realized the difference between a rudderless widget company and a destination site that is making itself a sociality hub? Or is everyone taking a day off? I fear the latter.
Tumblr is great. Their subscription service will succeed (read up on LiveJounral before the SixApart acq if you don’t agree) and many more people will use it over time.
Best success to Karp, UnionSq & Spark et. al.
You sound a bit bitter Ted. :)
“gonna be?”
Really? C’mon, step it up a bit!
I just created a blog in less than 2 min. This is absolutely great and the UI is very pleasing too.
Tumblr is a cool site. Not a clever idea though, in that it just took the obvious evolutionary step from the Twitter interface.
I think Twitter could crush Tumblr easily just by adding the capabilities of Tumblr… the question is will Twitter and even if they wanted to…when.
Finally, I would not invest in a freemium model for micro blogging platform. Theoretically I could see corporate feature sets where they would want to pay, ala Squarespace, but the total monies received won’t amount to enough to make the VC’s happy or justify a large acq premium.
Tumblr is great. Big props to those guys. Love their powerful simplicity.
Can’t wait to see what else this simple, but powerful type of thinking can produce.
Dave
http://www.etegrity.tumblr.com