High-school dropout and Tumblr founder David Karp is doing a presentation today at the Eventoblog conference in sunny Sevilla, Spain. In one of his first slides, Karp shared some statistics about Tumblr, which appears to be growing pretty well, pretty quickly.
Last August, the Tumblr team shared some growth statistics and claimed 50 million visitors and a healthy 255 million impressions in July 2009. This month (which I reckon is not actually this month but rather October), Tumblr self-reports 20 million unique vistors and 420 million impressions.
This means either Tumblr lost about 30 million unique monthly visitors in the past few months, or there’s some mix-up about what’s being measured exactly and shared publicly (visits vs. visitors, perhaps?). But third-party measuring services like Compete acknowledge that traffic numbers are definitely heading in the right direction.
According to Karp, Tumblr is currently seeing 2 million Tumblr bloggers publish about 40 million new posts per month. About 10,000 new people sign up for Tumblr every day on average, and the retention rate is very high: close to 85% remains active after registering for the micro-blogging service (note that Tumblr, besides drop-dead simple, is free of charge).
And as you can tell from the picture I took of one of his slides, 35% use Tumblr on Facebook, while only 15% connects the service to Twitter. The bookmarklet is relatively popular too, with about one third of Tumblr’s users installing it. About 15% downloads the company’s iPhone application (which is admittedly really good).
I had a brief chat with Karp last night about the company, which counts only 10 full-time employees today. Karp told me Tumblr is still not all too worried about its ability to generate revenue with the service, keeping its options open and trying to come up with innovative ways of making money rather than merely adding standard premium features or advertising.
What they are experimenting with, however, are imminent paid features that would basically give Tumblr users a way to promote their content in ‘new ways’. Sounds rather vague, so we’ll just have to wait and see what they come up with.
Also on the roadmap: localization. The Tumblr team is currently considering translating the service and offering customer support in more languages besides English.
Karp said Tumblr, which raised about $5.25 million in venture capital to date, has about two years of runway left before running out of cash.
So the main question for Tumblr is: can they continue on their growth path and find a way to turn all those eyeballs and all that activity into cold hard cash, or is it destined to fade out as more and more publishing platforms add micro-blogging features to their applications?
That’s very impressive for a few reasons. 1, the guy dropped out of school and is now running a pretty successful business which generates massive amounts of pageviews, and 2, they’ve been able to survive on very little funding compared to other funded startups which are burning through the same amount of cash in years, if not months.
David Karp is a bright man http://www.obse...take-tumblr-man
LOL how old is that profile picture of David?
Note that Tumblr uses the Quantcast tag, so you can see its directly measured US and global traffic by day, week, or month:
http://www.quan...p-19UtqE8ngoZbM
Indeed, but Quantcast doesn’t take into account the Tumblr blogs that have their own domain names (about 15%)
i’m one of them…
You may want to check that. Tumblr serves the Quantcast tag in an iframe on all its sites (including those on custom domains, such as mine). They appear on the “syndicators” tab (along with sites that embed any sort of Tumblr content). That’s why you’ll see, e.g., thisiswhyyourefat.com (a Tumblr site on its own domain) listed on that page.
I think the syndication users roll up into the total, though I’m not entirely sure.
As Argo says quantcast includes those sites under syndicators and the traffic stats seem to match up, 420 million page views and 18 million uniques. You could also see stats for just the Tumblr domain here: http://www.quan....com/tumblr.com
thought blogging had been solved in 2004? simplicity blogging is twitr. will this company get squashed by gogl or twitr?
i believe tumblr have a bright future!
I wish they’d sort out their downtime.
With 420 million impression per month! it is really good for tumblr.bright future and make sure bloggers have the concrete reason to use tumblr.
I find this very encouraging in terms of what we are doing with CloudProfile in the small business space. Light blogging (richer than Twitter, less complicated and formal than a traditional web site) clearly helps to break down barriers around user participation. In service providers we’ve worked with, we often see activation and activity rates on traditional shared web hosting offerings that are super low (e.g. less than 5% of users active even measured over several months).
I’m interested in what specific features/aspects of Tumblr have made the difference for users vs. other options.
Good work Tumblr!
I like Tumblr because it’s quick and easy but i’ve had trouble keeping Tumblr blog pages indexed into Google.
i’ve never used tumblr personally, but i’ve lurked it a few times and i like the pointlessness of the community. everyone else i know seemsm to like and use tumblr and spend hours and hours there. man. i thought that tumblr would become less popular over time but it’s still alive and thriving. i might have to give in soon and get me on tumblr.
I have a tumblr and posterous myself and I originally though posterous would’ve made it obsolete with the all the features it has to offer (like integrated comments!). Tumblr is just more fun to customize and post compared to posterous, which I find a bit boring to just e-mail my blog posts. I still don’t really understand the whole “liking” a blog feature. I know it spreads awareness but it would be much nicer to add commentary to them (without having to reblog) instead of just getting a list of likes.
I think this also shows parents with money mean more to your success than education? He moved to Japan at the age of 17 and prepaid the rent for 5 months…I don’t think an average 17 year old could do that unless his parents were rich, no?
Dave wasn’t your average 17 year old. He was working as CTO of UrbanBaby at the time –> http://www.obse...take-tumblr-man
Hi guys, Shimon here. Wordpress knows how to make money, why not Tumblr? They flash ads with some fat boy for t-shirts, which is so distracting when Im trying to post, I will never buy one. Ok, sometimes ad is for a kid sooo skinny and hes like some hipster cool guy as you say in the Williamsburg. In America can you trade in pageviews for money as part of Obama bailout plans? Otherwise, traffic just raise bill for dumb investors. We have saying where I come from “if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”
I tried setting up a Tumblr account but the machine crashed when it figured out that I don’t live in Brooklyn.
+1
Excellent article… These guys are on the right path and their future is bright.
Pretty stupid looking site. Big fonts yay! Can’t wait for social media bubble to soil itself. 21 years of age indicates a wing and a prayer not skills.