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It depends who you ask and what you mean by "traction"--different segments of internet users joined the network for diffferent reasons at different times. When much of the publishing world was reshaping in 2008, many started up Tumblrs to curate content that they couldn't at magazines they'd been laid off from. Soon, they found it easy to network and connect to more influential members of that industry--and once word got around about this ease of connection (powered by quality of content, not social capital), players from other industries slowly trickled in. Although Tumblr remains a primarily creative avenue.
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But directories have clumsy interfaces, and they didn't scale to the overwhelming growth in the number of websites. There were too many sites to catalog, and it was hard to determine relative rank of one site to another, in particular in context of what any one individual might find relevant (this is notable - because where directories broke down was essentially around their inflexibility to deal with individual's specific discovery needs. Directories failed at personalization, and because they were human-created, they failed to scale. Ironically, the first human-created discovery product failed to feel...human).
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But once again, what we want to pay attention to is changing. Sure, we still want to find good sites (Yahoo's original differentiation), and we want to find just the right content (Google's original differentiation). But now we also want to find out "What's Happening" and "Who's Doing What", as well as "Who Might I Connect With" in any number of ways.*
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I don't know why they won't use nice looking ads from sites like Carbon or The Deck, which IMO add value rather than take away.
I just read that Tumblr has passed WordPress in terms of # of installed blogs, but I believe Matt's company makes tons more cash. Very interesting too, considering WP is OS.
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Wordpress has also enabled lots of developers to make tons of money through templates and plugins. For example, woothemes makes millions/year selling wordpress templates.
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Overall, Posterous has 9.2 million monthly visitors on its own site and on custom domains, according to Quantcast, which measures the service directly with its permission. That’s up from 6 million in September, but still quite a bit less than competitors like Tumblr and WordPress, which have 59.6 million and 517 million people, respectively.
The new groups product sends a ton of email (with user permission, and with the help of SendGrid): 230,000 messages per day. Half of Posterous group distribution is over email rather than the Web, and 30 percent of users are not registered.
As I mentioned earlier, most groups–76 percent–are private. And a quarter are for corporate groups–an alternative to business collaboration tools like Yammer. Business groups have an average of 15 people, while family groups have about 10.
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- Tumblr accomplishes two major things:
- Tumblr is easier to use -- and faster to update -- than traditional blogging platforms. It is possible to add value to your Tumblr with a post made in thirty seconds.
- Tumblr has created a social community around blogging and "web clipping."
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Tumblr is more social than other blogging platforms and incorporates RSS right into the platform.
It also allows for "lifestreaming". Whereas WordPress is primarily for writing, Tumblr makes it easy to incorporate photos and music straight from your phone into your blog. So if you aren't the type to dedicate an hour to a blog post and just want to keep people updated in more than 140 characters, it's the way to go.
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So why doesn’t he do that? As he goes onto explain, he’d rather find ways to make money that also “enhance the experience for our users.” Tumblr does charge for things like being featured in its directory or $9 themes users can buy to spruce up their Tumblog. Karp notes that some theme designers are making tens of thousands of dollars month. Still, these seem more like ancillary revenue streams than what will end up being Tumbr’s main revenue source down the line. Fortunately for Karp, he has patient investors and just raised $30 million to keep scaling the service and figure out a more natural business model.
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Tumblr CEO David Karp recently sat down with Chris Dixon for a Founder Stories interview in which explains how he started Tumblr four years ago as a reaction to other blogging tools out there. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” People wanted to express themselves and blog, but he felt that the standard blogging platforms available at the time—Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad—were too complicated. “These tools I just don’t think worked for most people. It’s a commitment, you need to sit down for an hour and hammer out a post.”
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But don’t Twitter and Facebook lower those barriers even further? They do, but they lack a strong expressive identity, argues Karp. “They are not tools built for creative expression,” he says, adding: “Nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook.” Okay, he’s got a point there. Tumblr, in contrast, is built to be a place you can be proud to call your online home. It’s very design-oriented and you can customize your Tumblr to reflect your personality, but not in a cheesy MySpace way. For Twitter and Facebook, “expression isn’t necessarily something they care about.”
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Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.
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One of the more interesting startup battles in recent times has been Tumblr vs. Posterous, two light blogging services that make it easy for anyone to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr was the first kid on the block, but over the past year Posterous has tried to take users away from Tumblr with arguably better features and aggressive marketing. Of particular note was a campaign by Posterous in June, offering tools for people to import their content from other products (including Tumblr) into Posterous.
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The main factors in Tumblr's growth have been its first mover advantage (particularly important in an entirely new market segment, which this was when Tumblr started), celebrities and big media companies using Tumblr sites, and Tumblr's ability to socialize its service better than Posterous.
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