Wednesday 7 November 2012

Tumblr showing stunning growth. 20 Billion page impressions a month. Start up to billionaire in 6 years.

 


Tumblr is really growing and is now one of the Top 20 visited websites in the US - about 19th (Google is number 1). In July last year, Tumblr was 92nd!! So this is a real dramatic rise.

The site now collects, wait for it....20 BILLION pageviews a month (Facebook collects a trillion a month, Twitter 5.9 billion a month) but this is dramatically up from Tumblr's 13 billion in September. Huge growth.

These are staggering numbers. Founder David Karp started Tumblr in 2007, really for himself to share his blog but the smartphone has really pushed it, which Karp credits as being the business driver. A lot of the site's traffic comes from mobile apps. Again, it points to the role of mobile in online businesses. Mobiles are basically pocket computers and getting more advanced so everything we do needs to be mobile enabled.

There's 77 million posts a day on Tumblr and shows the power of blogging. As a source of content, blogging is big and provides rich content to publishers globally. Tumblr however used blogging to develop photo sharing, a key online activity and the site, www.tumblr.com, looks terrific from a design point of view. It's really overseen by people who care about it because that shines through.

It should also be remembered that this traffic is "engaged" - they're taking time to read blogs, exactly as you are. So these are valuable visitors and have in a lot of cases, loyalty to a particular blog. So they return to read time and again as they follow a blog.

The company had an 800 million valuation mid 2011 and I expect it has now well exceeded that, deservedly. After all, Karp started it with his own money from a salary he was paid when working at Urbanbaby
 

It's a real start-up story driven by a techy with an idea and now it's going from strength to strength. One we should admire and point to. Karp is living the dream and has done it in the nicest, freshest way.
 
Just goes to show. 
An idea to billionaire in 6 years. 
Only the web can do that. 

(Don't you just hate him....)

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