• May 25th, 2011

    Tumblr Revamps 'Directory' To Better Surface Great Content (Video)

    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→ Read More

    May 17th, 2011

    All Of July 2009: Tumblr Did 250 Million Pageviews. May 16, 2011: Tumblr Did… 250 Million Pageviews

    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… → Read More

    May 16th, 2011

    New York Reveals Plan To Become America's Next Top Digital City

    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… → Read More

    May 9th, 2011

    Tumblr Launches 'Share On Tumblr' Button For Publishers

    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’ → Read More

    April 7th, 2011

    The Beastie Boys Make Some Noise For Tumblr

    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

    February 24th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Tumblr's David Karp: My Heroes Are Steve Jobs And Willy Wonka

    Some Internet wunderkinds don’t bother to finish college. Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school, and now runs one of the fastest growing publishing platforms on the Web. In our final segment from this week’s Founder Stories (also watch parts I, II, and III), Karp answers some of Chris Dixon’s rapid-fire questions in the video above. He talks about his best business decision ever… → Read More

    February 22nd, 2011

    (Founder Stories) David Karp: "Making Money Off Tumblr Would Be Incredibly Easy"

    It’s a common criticism of popular Web services that don’t yet make a lot of money: Where’s the business model? That criticism has certainly been lobbed at Tumblr, the short-burst publishing platform all the kids are flocking to these days. Tumblr generates billions of pageviews across its networks and is growing at more than 250 million pageviews per week. “Making money off of Tumblr would be… → Read More

    February 21st, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don't Work For Most People

    In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the status bursts of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form publishing of Wordpress-style blogs. If anything, it is more accurately described as micro-blogging than Twitter or Facebook because you actually… → Read More

    February 12th, 2011

    (Founder Stories) Fred Wilson Explains Why He Wouldn't Invest In Groupon Or Pandora

    Few VCs have a hotter hand right now than Fred Wilson. His firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Clickable, and more . In this episode of Founder Stories, he talks to host Chris Dixon about Union Square’s investment thesis has changed from going after all web apps to companies that are “building a large networks of engaged users.” (Watch the… → Read More

    January 28th, 2011

    David Karp: "Tumblr Is Growing By A Quarter Billion Impressions Every Week"

    David Karp

    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

    January 18th, 2011

    "Squirrels" And 100 Other Reasons Why Tumblr Is Down

    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

    December 20th, 2010

    Report: Blogger Most Reliable Blogging Platform As Tumblr Tumbles On

    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

    December 17th, 2010

    Ok Tumblr, This Is Getting Just A Little Embarrassing

    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

    December 6th, 2010

    Tumblr Finally Starts Recovering After 24 Hours Of Downtime

    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

    December 6th, 2010

    Victim Of Its Own Success: Tumblr Redefines The Concept Of "Back Shortly"

    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

    December 2nd, 2010

    Gowalla 3.0 Unifies Check-Ins, Places With Facebook, Twitter, And Yes, Foursquare

    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

    November 19th, 2010

    What's New At Tumblr: Funding, Hires, Office, Board Member, And A Focus On Fashion

    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

    November 14th, 2010

    Did Tumblr Just Reverse Take Down 4Chan?

    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

    November 12th, 2010

    Why All The Interest In Tumblr? Try 1,540 Percent Pageview Growth

    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

    November 12th, 2010

    As Funding Talk Swirls, Tumblr Lands A Director Of Product

    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

    October 4th, 2010

    Pay Now, Read Later: Instapaper Starts Testing Subscriptions

    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

    September 21st, 2010

    Marco Arment Leaves Tumblr To Devote Himself To Instapaper

    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

    September 20th, 2010

    Microblogging Wars Escalate: Posterous Claims Tumblr Blocks Its Autopost Feature

    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

    August 23rd, 2010

    Still Surging, Tumblr Rockets Past A Billion Posts

    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

    July 19th, 2010

    Tumblr Is On Fire. Now Over 6 Million Users, 1.5 Billion Pageviews A Month

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    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

    July 5th, 2010

    Posterous Growing At More Than 700 Percent a Year

    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

    April 20th, 2010

    Union Square, Spark Capital Double Tumblr's Funding To $10 Million

    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

    March 24th, 2010

    Instapaper For The iPad May Be The First Killer App. And It Will Be Universal.

    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

    March 23rd, 2010

    Tumblr Rolls Out Make Money Plan Part 2: Beautiful Themes

    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

    February 24th, 2010

    Google Buzz Boosts Sharing On Google Reader By 35 Percent

    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