Tumblr Tops 100 Million Blogs, Beats WordPress.com by 37 Million
Tumblr has faced some issues in its 6 years as a blog hosting service, but none were serious enough to stop it from setting a new milestone today. According to the Tumblr about page, the service is now home to over 100 million blogs:
Tumblr’s last milestone was in April 2012, when the service reached 50 million blogs for the first time. In just under a year Tumblr has matched has doubled in size. And as you can see in the screen shot above, well over 44 billion blog posts have been published on Tumblr, with 80.2 million published today.
This is all the more impressive because Tumblr has far outgrown the best-known blogging service, WordPress.com. That site currently supports 63 million blogs,with around 39 million blog posts and 41 million comments going live each month. Of course, part of the reason why the WordPress stats look so anemic is that they don’t include the many millions of self-hosted WordPress websites (like this one, for example), just the sites hosted on WordPress.com.
One important difference between Tumblr and WordPress is that the former can’t be set up as its own website. All Tumblr blogs are hosted by Tumblr.
Comments
Robert Nagle March 27, 2013 um 11:23 pm
Would someone mind explaining to me why Tumblr is so popular? What features does it have that wordpress does not for example? I get the impression that it’s better for photo galleries and uploading from mobile devices, but I still haven’t figured out what’s the appeal of it.
Nate Hoffelder March 27, 2013 um 11:25 pm
I have no clue. It’s far less capable than WordPress in many ways.
Circularity March 27, 2013 um 11:46 pm
I think that’s the point. Most people don’t have enough to say to fill a full blog, but hey! What about a Tumblr of celebrities whose heads are shaped like squashes?!
yuzutea March 28, 2013 um 12:42 am
The reblogging and social aspects. Also, they give away a lot of stuff for free that would cost money elsewhere. You’re also not forced to display ads on your blog.
Juli Monroe March 28, 2013 um 9:06 am
It’s where certain TV and movie fandoms have flocked. Lots of people have moved from LiveJournal to Tumblr, probably because it’s a quicker and easier interface. I use it to keep up with what’s happening in the world of BBC Sherlock. Tumblr is the best source of information about it. A lot of those "blogs" are actually just sources of reblogs. I think there’s a lot more original content on WordPress.