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 about that for a second. Over the last 30 days, that came to 4.2 billion pageviews.
If you are wondering why Tumblr’s been having so much downtime lately, just take a look at the comScore chart below, which shows its own estimate of 2.5 billion pageviews for the month of December, up from 335 million from the year before. All of that is coming from 19 million unique visitors per month globally, according to comScore. (Karp’s numbers are based on his own internal Google Analytics and they are for a slightly different time period). → 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 both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. → 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 tweeted an hour ago that “All blogs are online and we’re incrementally restoring access to the Dashboard.”
Note that Tumbr isn’t fully functional yet, as only some users can add content to their sites now. But at least visitors aren’t getting an error message any more. → 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 and Facebook to voice their displeasure – some of them went to bed last night around the time the service went down and woke up this morning to see their beloved blogs are still not available. → 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 still pushing hard there. It’s getting even more out of control. I’m about ready to declare check-in bankruptcy. Or I was, until Gowalla decided to do something bold.
The location-based service has decided to fundamentally altered their app to allow you to check-in to not only their service, but also into Facebook’s and even Foursquare’s as well. Yes, they’ve just become compatible with their chief rivals. → 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 the funding.
But while the numbers are still a bit up in the air, we do know that as Fortune and Business Insider reported earlier, Sequoia Capital is leading this new round. And we’ve heard that previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures are on board once again. Further, like Business Insider, we’re hearing that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will join Tumblr’s Board as a part of this investment, which will likely close in the next couple of weeks. → 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 possible that Tumblr users, which had been planning a counterattack for tomorrow, moved it up to today to break 4Chan? → 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 the year before (see chart above). Unique visitors from the U.S. hit 6 million, up 150 percent (see chart below). Worldwide visitors in September were around 14 million. → 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 Architect in charge of many of the interesting things they do with technology. It looks like today is his last day of work for the Times, and he’ll be joining team Tumblr shortly, Tumblr President John Maloney confirms. “We’re thrilled and excited about what Derek will bring to the team/product,” Maloney writes in an email. Gottfrid had been with the Times for 12 years. → 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. And now he’s wasting little time trying to come up with some ways to make money and extend his creation.
Today, Instapaper rolled out an early beta test of a new Subscriptions service. What is it? It’s a way to pay a subscription fee of $1 a month to the service. Actually, it’s technically $3 for 3 months, because PayPal takes a minimum of $0.30 for each transaction, so Arment needed to make the payment scale make sense financially. → 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 speculation as to what he’d be up to after the Tumblr gig, Arment responded, “I’ll be devoting most of my time to Instapaper. It has a very healthy future, hopefully.” → 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 service in the latter’s back-end get served the following notice, which leaves little to the imagination (emphasis ours):
Link Your Tumblr Account
Your full blog post will get autoposted to your Tumblr. Don’t worry about where you’re going to host your images, files, or music anymore. We’ll always just do the right thing.
Tumblr autopost has been temporarily disabled — seems like they are blocking our API requests at present moment. We’re working on getting this resolved. In the meantime, you might try emailing Tumblr support about it.
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 Tumblr blog URL. Sometime a couple hours ago, it passed 1 billion — and the broken counter on the Tumblr About page confirms this (it was only set to got up to 999,999,999). → 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. in terms of traffic as gauged by Quantcast. And only half of Tumblr’s 6.25 million users are in the U.S. Those users are now posting some 4.5 million posts a day — that’s up from 650,000 new posts a day a year ago. → Read More
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