This morning, I logged into Tumblr (where I run my personal blog) and saw confetti flying everywhere on the screen. Was Tumblr hacked? Were they converting the platform to be Geocities-powered complete with animated GIFs? No, they were celebrating. They just hit 10 billion posts across the network.
The numbers are staggering. It was only a year ago that they hit 1 billion posts. Since then, they’ve 10x’d that number.
The traffic numbers are just as impressive. In July of last year, Tumblr was seeing 1.5 billion pageviews a month — that number now stands at 13 billion. Yes, they almost managed to 10x that number as well. And unlike numbers from Compete or Alexa which tend to be utter crap, Tumblr uses Quantcast data which is fairly solid (though still not perfect) because it’s directly measured.
The service also now says it has just under 28.5 million blogs. And those blogs are doing around 36 million posts a day (that’s up from 4.5 million last July).
Amid this insane growth, Tumblr has run headfirst into some major scaling issues. That remains a priority for the team right now. Well, that and the massive round of funding they’re about to close that should value them near $1 billion.
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. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
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