Tumblr is growing like a weed, but “the last four or five months totally overshadow everything that came before it,” founder David Karp tells Chris Dixon in a taping today for TCTV (watch the video above). “We are growing by a quarter billion impressions every week,” he revealed. Last week Tumblr did 1.2 billion impressions, or pageviews, and it is adding 250 million every week. Just think… → Read More
With Tumblr recently experiencing a 24-hour offline stint and a reported single 9 of service reliability, there are plenty of jokes about the microblogging service’s infamous downtime (most I’ve heard have at least a tenuous WikiLeaks connection).
Here’s the most elaborate Tumblr satire piece yet: Go to http://wellbebackshortly.com/ and hit refresh. Hit refresh again, and again. → Read More
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.
Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in… → Read More
Micro-blogging sensation Tumblr is down again. It’s only been a good week since the service was unavailable for more than 24 hours (yes, hours, not minutes).
I’m not even a Tumblr user, but this is getting out of hand. I mean, even Twitter is up for the moment, but their status blog – hosted on Tumblr – is down.
Update: and they’re partially back up now, but still terribly unstable. → Read More
Popular blogging service Tumblr is finally recovering from its seemingly endless downtime. The final tally: over 24 hours, based on the tweet Tumblr sent out around 4PM PST yesterday announcing that it was “working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters.” Tumblr followed that up over the ensuing day with some intermittent (and overly optimistic) status updates, and … → Read More
Boy does it suck to be Tumblr right now. The blogging service has been down for roughly half a day (yes, that would be 12 13 14 15 21 hours) now, due to a “major issue in one of its database clusters”. There are no more details available at this point, and a request for more information wasn’t immediately responded to.
Tumblr’s many users are understandably very frustrated and taking to Twitter… → Read More
This past March, I came home from SXSW with a problem. The so-called “location war” hadn’t yielded one check-in service to rule them all. In fact, several new ones popped up just at that conference alone. Check-in fatigue set in.
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. Now Facebook has launched itself right smack dab in the middle of the location space with Places. And others like Yelp are… → Read More
For the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about a large new round of funding that the social startup Tumblr was raising. That culminated today with a report in Fortune with numbers on the round. We had been hearing very similar numbers — around $25 million on a $100 million pre-money evaluation — but it turns out those numbers were likely low, we had heard from sources close to… → Read More
Today was supposed to be the day that 4Chan took down Tumblr. Instead, it looks like 4Chan itself is down. Could Tumblr be behind it?
As you can see, 4Chan is down for everyone, not just me. And it has been that way for at least the past 15 minutes. The timing is interesting since it was supposed to be 5 PM ET when the 4Chan DDoS attack was to begin — that was roughly 15 minutes ago. It is… → Read More
Tumblr is attracting a lot of attention right now There is talk of a big funding round in the works and it is making significant hires. Why all the interest?
Sometime last June, blogging service Tumblr hit an inflection point. It’s visitors and pageviews just took off. According to comScore, Tumblr served up 1.2 billion pageviews in the U.S. in October, up a mind-boggling 1,540 percent from… → Read More
Earlier today, a Business Insider report indicated that Tumblr has landed a “very big and competitive” new round of funding from Sequoia Capital. We’re still looking into that, and they’re not commenting, but here’s one thing we do know about the company: they’ve just hired a new Director of Product.
Derek Gottfrid will be joining the company from The New York Times where he was the Senior… → Read More
There are few services I use more on a daily basis than Instapaper. The super-simple bookmarking tool has been my go-to way to come back to articles to read later for a few years now. And with brilliant iPhone and iPad apps, Instapaper has only gotten better with time. So I was happy to hear that developer Marco Arment was stepping down from his role as CTO of Tumblr to focus on the product more. → Read More
Tumblr CTO and notable blogger Marco Arment announced today that he would be leaving his position at Tumblr to focus on more independent projects. What many in the tech world are curious about is what this means for Instapaper, a service which allows you to “save” web pages in order for you to read them later. Thus far Instapaper has only been a side project for Arment.
When asked to confirm… → Read More
Posterous users can automatically push content posted to their blogs onto other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and so on. Up until recently, people could even post content like text, pictures and videos to their Posterous account and subsequently have it auto-posted to a Tumblr blog.
Now, as of this morning it seems, people who try to link a Tumblr blog to the Posterous… → Read More
Last month, we gave an update on the state of Tumblr that included some pretty impressive stats: over 6 million users, 1.5 billion pageviews a month, and 4.5 million new posts a day. Throw those all out the window.
The blogging/microblogging/social/whateveryouwanttocallit network has just crossed 1 billion total posts today. You can tell by looking at the number after the “/post/” area in each… → Read More
One year ago, in July 2009, Tumblr was going strong. They had 255 million pageviews that month. By November of last year, that was up to 420 million pageviews. But some new stats which Tumblr is releasing today show an explosion in growth since then. Tumblr is now at 1.5 billion pageviews a month — their Quantcast data confirms this.
For the first time, Tumblr is now a top 50 site in the U.S. → Read More
Somewhere in between full blogging platforms like Wordpress and the 140-character limit of Twitter, true microblogging sites like Tumblr and Posterous are taking off. I call these true microblogging sites because they are designed for quick hits but can support photos, themes, and other more blog-like features. Tumblr has been around longer and is getting quite big (23 million monthly unique… → Read More
Microblogging startup Tumblr, based out of New York, has raised $5 million more from the same investors who’d already bankrolled the company with a little over $5 million over two previous rounds, namely Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.
The financing round, Tumblr’s third, was first reported by MediaMemo and comes at a time when the three-year-old startup is starting to push a bunch of… → Read More
The simple bookmarking application Instapaper made by Tumblr developer Marco Arment is one of my favorite applications, period. Between the web, the iPhone, and the Kindle, it’s easily one of my most-used apps. And I have no doubt that a fourth category is about to be added to that list: the iPad.
Tonight, Arment posted a preview of Instapaper for the iPad, and it sounds perfect for the device. → Read More
Earlier this month, Tumblr rolled out its first attempt at making money: a small ($9) fee to make your blog featured in a directory of blogs. Tomorrow, the service is officially rolling out its second revenue generator: premium themes.
The initial 13 themes being featured in this roll-out look pretty great. They come from 7 different designers and will range in price from $9 all the way up to… → Read More
Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9… → Read More
Just about a week ago, we noted how the blogging service Tumblr was testing out a new feature: photo replies. Apparently, the test worked so well that they decided to make it a permanent feature. They also apparently learned something else: people like commenting on posts. As such, they’ve started beta testing a new text replies feature today. Or, as the rest of us know them: comments.
Now, to be… → Read More
Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.
While it… → Read More
Remember Formspring.me, the service we covered two days ago that makes it easy to conduct your own online Q&A with the web at large? Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me” that does the exact same thing.
The new feature is simple: if you have a Tumblr blog, you can now add a form that lets your readers ask you whatever they want. They can leave… → Read More
I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.
TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever… → Read More
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… → Read More
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