Tumblr, the immensely popular but profitless blogging platform, just turned on its first set of paid “sponsor products” (Tumblr doesn’t like to call them “ads”). Even though the company resisted running ads on its network for a long time, it announced that it would launch this platform about two weeks ago at Ad Age’s Digital Conference in New York. For the most part, the new ads don’t intrude on Tumblr’s users blogs. Instead, the company is using its Radar and Spotlight features to highlight content from its advertisers/sponsors. → Read More
Tumblr is clarifying its sticky position regarding the new policy to ban certain blogs from its network. You may remember last week, when the company took the bold stance that blogs promoting self-harm, including anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation and suicide, would no longer be allowed on its network.
Today, the company is following up on the policy change to explain that it’s not banning blogs that are engaged in “discussion, support, encouragement, and documenting the experiences of those dealing with difficult conditions,” only those that are meant to trigger self-harm. But how will Tumblr know which is which? → Read More
Tumblr is introducing a new feature today that lets its users pay a dollar in order to have their post featured on the Tumblr Dashboard. The option is called “Highlights,” and it’s now available right from the new post page on Tumblr. With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important.
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Lightbox, the beautifully designed social photo app for Android backed by $1.2 million in seed funding from Index, Accel, SV Angel, 500 Startups, and others, is today launching a revamped web interface that’s like a lazy man’s Tumblr. As with the hot blogging startup Tumblr, the idea with Lightbox’s new photo journal feature is to provide a stream of updates others can follow, share, like and comment on.
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Is Tumblr facing a growing spam problem? For many regular users of the blogging platform, the answer is “yes.” Although Tumblr hasn’t taken to its own blog to provide a public update on its progress in fighting spam, it did recently address the concerns of a high-profile Tumblr user – the associate producer of NPR’s Fresh Air, Melody Kramer, who maintains a blog for the popular program hosted on the Tumblr platform.
To Kramer, Tumblr acknowledged that it’s aware of a recent increase in spam blogs and is “doing everything we can to quickly suspend these blogs and to keep more of them from being created.” → Read More
President Obama has added a new web service to his repertoire: Tumblr, the hot blogging service that just raised another $85 million in funding. You can find the new blog right here.
The site was set up by the 2012 Obama/Biden campaign, which also runs his Facebook page and Twitter account (The White House also recently launched an account on Foursquare).
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Blogging community operator Tumblr has raised $85 million in new funding from Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Richard Branson also participated in the round.
The news was broken moments ago by the NYT’s Jenna Wortham, who writes that the company will announce the financing later today. → Read More
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. → Read More
We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, and this one is sure is sure to be a crowd pleaser: red-hot blogging platform Tumblr. The NYC-based startup has been growing like crazy (they’re now up to 11.6 billion page views per month), and they’ve given us a chance to take a peek inside their headquarters.
For a company with over $40 million in funding the Tumblr team is still surprisingly small, and the office is relatively humble. But there’s plenty of charm: handcrafted furniture, board games abound, and robots that look suspiciously like my favorite wizard.
Be sure to watch til the end, when I get to walk Tumblr founder David Karp’s dog.
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Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace.
What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?
Blogging or “self-publishing” in any form was supposed to democratize and revolutionize the media industry. Content creators no longer needed mainstream platforms to get their voices heard. Bloggers weren’t beholden to editors, and self-publishers could monetize their content with AdWords or any host of ad network partners.
Where to host your content is a tricky issue. When blogging started to become a serious endeavor and Internet folks realized they could amass their own audiences, they naturally assumed it was important to own their domain, control their distribution list, maintain the links that have been built up to their content, or in summary, control their own destiny. → Read More
Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.
Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. → Read More
If you are part of the Tumblr Nation, and a growing number of you are, then you will want to download Tumblr’s new iPhone app, redesigned from the ground up with a new interface. It loads up your Tumblr Dashboard stream, but the post button brings up six simple icons for each post type: text, photo, link, quote, audio, and video.And then, of course, you can post photos or videos right from your phone.
New features include support for multiple Tumblogs, landscape editing, replying to messages, and saving drafts. It also taps into your address book on your phone to help you find other people to follow on Tumblr. And new users can sign up right from the mobile app. → Read More
Last month, founder David Karp noted that Tumblr was now seeing over 250 million pageviews a day. As we noted, that was incredible since as recently as July of 2009, they were seeing 250 million pageviews for the entire month. But it turns out that the numbers are much more incredible than they first appeared.
I noticed this when Tumblr President John Maloney posted earlier today that Tumblr was now doing north of 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. That number was around 7 billion just a month ago, and when I drilled down into Tumblr’s publicly available numbers on Quantcast, I noticed a massive surge in pageviews in the last few weeks. So massive, in fact, that the data looks more like a solar flare. → Read More
I hate email. Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate email. There’s just too much of it. It’s always flowing in. It never stops. And it’s getting worse.
As time goes on, even if inbox overload isn’t a problem for you right now, it will be. And I’m increasingly convinced that there is no actual solution. A ton of people are out there working on the problem — companies both big and small. Some of the “solutions” are nice and smart. But they’re all either masks or temporary fixes. No one wants to admit the truth: only real way to solve the email problem is to blow email up and start over again.
But that will obviously be a massive undertaking that will likely take years to get everyone on the same page, using the same service/protocol — if it works at all. So for now, might I suggest you do what I do and use a bunch of smaller solutions to ease the email pressure? And a new one appeared today: Tumblr. → Read More
Exclusive - In a conversation with TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid after his panel on scaling fast-growing Internet businesses, Tumblr CEO David Karp talks not only about his lazy dog but also some new product developments that should be going live right about now.
In short, Tumblr has given Directory, where people looking for great content on the network have had the chance to find their fix for years now, a decent upgrade. → Read More
Two years ago, Tumblr founder David Karp shared some impressive numbers. In July 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million pageviews, and 650,000 new posts per day. A year later, we noted that they were “on fire” with 6 million users and 1.5 billion pageviews. If that was being on fire, it’s hard to know how to describe them now.
On their staff blog, Karp has just shared that Tumblr did 250 million pageviews — just yesterday. Yes, they’re now doing roughly the same number of pageviews a day as they were doing in an entire month two years ago. The data, which is being directly measured by Quantcast, doesn’t lie. And it’s amazing. → Read More
Through new official partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, and NY-based startups Foursquare and Tumblr, New York aims to become America’s next, top digital city.
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the city’s first, chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, presented their Road Map for the Digital City, today.
Before formulating the plan, Sterne led a comprehensive 90-day review of the city’s current use of web, social media and mobile technology, and surveyed thousands of public and private sector organizations, and residential users in New York… → Read More
Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and even Google, blogging platform Tumblr has released its ‘Share On Tumblr’ button, which allows publishers to add a button encouraging users to share their content on Tumblr (just paste the javascript tag into your source code).
The basic behavior of the button is simple enough, but the advanced features are where the ‘Share on Tumblr’ button sets itself apart from other social engagement buttons out there. → Read More
Yes, Tumblr is growing like crazy. But you know a social media site has arrived when big rock bands start releasing tracks from upcoming albums on your site. The Beastie Boys have a Tumblr blog, where you can listen to the song “Make Some Noise” from their next album. → Read More
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