Tumblr Hits Quantcast’s List Of Top 10 U.S. Networks

Tumblr is announcing today that it has broken into the top 10 networks in the U.S., according to third-party measurement firm Quantcast. According to a post from Tumblr CEO David Karp, the site now reaches a worldwide audience of 170 million people. [Updated, see below]

No additional details were provided on what that means in context – instead, the post merely linked to this page on Quantcast’s website which says Tumblr now sees 202,637,856 visits per month in the U.S. and 616,776,768 visits worldwide. The reach in terms of people per month indicated here is 60,803,592 in the U.S., and 168,243,984 worldwide – so Quantcast’s numbers are coming in a little low or Tumblr rounded up in making their own announcement about the data.

Oddly, even though the linked page for Tumblr.com includes the “top 10” badge, Quantcast’s own “top sites” list for the U.S. remains out of date – it still shows Tumblr at spot #15. [Update – Tumblr reported it was a top 10 website; it’s not. The issue appears to be that Tumblr mistook the “top ten” badge on Quantcast to mean that Tumblr had achieved that ranking. Quantcast’s top sites list shows Tumblr accurately after all – it’s ranked at #15. Instead, Quantcast has listed Tumblr as the #9 network, however.]

Quantcast tells us that the “network” number reports traffic to anyone’s blog that is a Tumblr blog – that is, it measures any time anyone visits any sort of Tumblr blog. The #15 ranking refers to anyone who visits www.tumblr.com. But since Tumblr allows for custom domains, the “network” measurement is actually a better reflection of Tumblr’s reach, as it turns out.

Tumblr today offers over 82 million blogs with over 36 billion blog posts, the company tells us. And it reports monthly pageviews topping 17 billion, which Quantcast’s data also confirms.

Meanwhile, according to comScore’s rankings from October, which looks at unique visitors, Tumblr came in at #40 – behind social competitors Facebook (#4), LinkedIn (#24), and Twitter (#25). On comScore’s rankings, an asterisk noted that not all traffic might be accounted for, saying “entity has assigned some portion of its traffic to other syndicated entities.”