Industry report

Tumblr Statistics, User, Demographics And Facts For 2021

David Karp mooted the concept of tumblelogs, a regular blogging platform in 2006. However, after waiting for larger brands to start a similar platform and not finding anything close in over a year, Karp started his blogging platform and launched Tumblr in February 2007. Although the platform initially started in tandem with Marco Arment, who was also a developer for the platform, Arment left Tumblr in 2010 to work on his other project- Instapaper. Jeff D’Onofrio is the current CEO of the company

Overview of Tumblr Statistics, User, Demographics And Facts For 2021

0.1 Tumblr Statistics, User, Demographics And Facts For 2021
0.2 Tumblr Growth
0.3 Tumblr Global Footprint

1 Tumblr Ownership

Key Stats

Over 450 million active users
In 2013 Tumblr was estimated to be worth $1.1 billion.
In 2019 Automattic brought it for a reported $3 million(.washingtonpost.com)

Tumblr Growth

In August 2010, Tumblr was one of the top 125 tech companies based out of New York by Lead 411.
In May 2011, Tumblr had just 5 billion posts on its platform. The number rose to an astonishing 165.5 billion posts in October 2018.
In 2011, for the first time, any social networking platform hosted the official blog of President Barack Obama, and that was Tumblr.
Tumblr began offering paid advertisements on its platform in April 2012. Adidas launched its soccer blog on Tumblr after the announcement mentioned above in June 2012.
Tumblr released its app for Google Glass in May 2013, but the project failed miserably, costing massive investment to the company.
In 2013, Tumblr had only 30 companies advertise on its platform. However, by 2019, this has increased to more than 60 companies and includes the likes of Starbucks, Nestle, Spotify, Pepsi, etc.
While Tumblr had 391 million accounts in 2018, by October, this number rose to 441.4 million blogging accounts on the platform.
Tumblr is available in 18 languages globally.
Tumblr users visit roughly 67 pages monthly on the microblogging platform.
com ranks in the 51^st position for the top-visited websites in the world.
Every second, 1,427 Tumblr posts get published. The same data for Instagram is 875 photos; for Skype, it is 3,425 calls, and for Twitter is 8,237 tweets.
Every day 22.2 million posts had made on Tumblr.
Tumblr had its due credit for the popularity and the use of GIFs by Oxford dictionary after GIF had made their way on the internet through Tumblr.

Tumblr Global Footprint

Tumblr over the years has gained traction in international markets; however, the most extensive user base of the microblogging platform still remains in the USA, with 45.95% of the desktop traffic to Tumblr originating from the USA.
The United Kingdom, on the other hand, leads 5.68% of the Tumblr desktop traffic and is the second-best traffic-generating content for Tumblr.
Canada comes in third, driving 5.36% of the traffic.
Australia and Brazil contribute 3.56% and 3.08% of the user traffic to Tumblr.
Remaining traffic from the rest of the countries, which is around 40%, originates from the desktop version of Tumblr.
Tumblr reached out to 13 million Mexicans in 2018, which is roughly 10% social network penetration in Mexico.
33% of users in Denmark use Tumblr, with 23% using Tumblr every day or more frequently.
China, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan blocked Tumblr in the country in 2013, 2018, and 2015 owing to pornography and terrorism-related content, respectively.

Tumblr Users & Demographics

69% of the users of Tumblr are those who belong to the millennial generation.
43% of Tumblr USA users are from the age group of 18-24-years.
14% of the US female internet users use Tumblr, and 27% of the male internet users use Tumblr.
In 2020, Tumblr expects 8.8% of the US user base. However, the growth rate of new users my reduce to 4.1% in 2020 as per projections.
When it comes to the Tumblr app, users spent around 135 minutes on the mobile app.

Number of Unique Visitors in 2019

A global survey of the desktop and mobile visits to tumblr.com between May 2019 and October 2019 revealed the number of unique visitors to the site.

In May 2019, Tumblr gained 364.5 million unique visitors as a combination of its desktop and mobile sites.
The graph scaled upwards in June 2019 when the number moved up to 372.5 million unique visitors.
It further reached to the peak in July 2019 when tumblr.com gained 379 million unique visitors that month.
However, the next month in August 2019, after the sale of Tumblr to Automatic became official, the number of unique visitors to the sites dropped off drastically to 348 million users.
In September 2019, the number again saw a slight increase to 355.5 million new visitors to the Tumblr browsing site on the web.
In October 2019, the number plummeted to 336 million unique visitors for the month.

Reasons to Use Tumblr in the USA

2100 people aged 15 years and more were interviewed in the USA to understand their primary purpose for using Tumblr. The interview was across a period of July-September 2019.

60% of the users mentioned entertainment as their primary purpose to use Tumblr.
17% of the usage was due to news involvement, and 15% usage attributed to brand affiliation and companies.
12% people said that they used Tumblr to build their professional network and another 12% used it to stay in touch with their loved ones.
21% of people cited other reasons as a preference to use Tumblr.

Frequency of Tumblr Usage

In the same study that identified the reasons to use Tumblr, it also identified how often users used Tumblr.

13% of respondents said that they used Tumblr multiples times on the same day, and 17% said that they used Tumblr daily.
21% mentioned that although their usage wasn’t daily, they still surfed Tumblr many times in a week.
17% of respondents went on to say that they used Tumblr once a week, usually.
10% of users said their frequency was a few times a month, and 6% used it just once a month on average.
14% of users further mentioned that their frequency was even lesser than once a month.
On average, every month, users access the app 29.8 times as compared to Facebook access, which is 167.3 times.

Tumblr Ownership

The ownership of Tumblr has switched hands multiple times.

The first acquisition of Tumblr was in June 2013, a month after Yahoo Inc. announced that it would acquire Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars cash.
Tumblr’s goals for gaining advertisements on its platform could not meet despite the acquisition, and the value of the company fell by 712 million dollars.
Verizon Communications eventually acquired yahoo in June 2017 at 4.48 billion dollars, which implied that Tumblr would now fall under Oath ownership- a subsidiary of Verizon.
David Karp left as CEO by the end of 2019, and Jeff D’Onofrio took charge as CEO.
After Verizon failed to get rid of the struggles of the company that it had acquired, by May 2019, Verizon was expressing interest in selling Tumblr.
Although Pornhub wished to purchase Tumblr, ultimately, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic in August 2019. The value of the company moved to less than 3 million dollars for sale.
Automattic, the operator of WordPress, suggested that Tumblr would henceforth be available as a WordPress.com complementary service.

Blogs & Posts on Tumblr

The highest activity in Tumblr happens between 4 pm to 10 pm EDT. Saturday and Sunday have the most actions.

In October 2015, there were 260.5 million blogs on Tumblr. The figure drastically increased to 319.8 million blogs in October 2016.
However, in October 2016, the platform increased to a total of only 373 million blogs, which was a lesser growth rate as compared to the previous year.
In October 2018, there was again a rise in the growth rate of blogs hosted on the platform, with 441.4 million blogs on Tumblr.
By April 2019, Tumblr hosted 463 million blogs, which increased to 471.6 million blogs in July 2019, 480.1 million blogs in October 2019, and as per the latest reports, in Jan 2020, there are over 488.1 million blogs on the platform.
When it comes to the posts on Tumblr, in April 2015, there were over 106 billion posts, which increased to 133 billion by April next year.
Further, in April 2017, the number rose to 148.1 billion posts on the platform, which increased to 160 billion in April 2018.
In April 2019, there were 171.4 billion posts, which further increased to 173 billion posts on Tumblr in June 2019 as per the latest statistics available.
Some of the most famous celebrity Tumblr pages include those of Britney Spears, Aziz Ansari, Taylor Swift, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Some of the most recommended pages on Tumblr are in the categories of humor, self-help, science, and movies.
The most recommended blog on Tumblr is Asking Jude, which is a mental health awareness blog run by Paige Claimer.
The next in line is That Kind of Woman, which is a lifestyle blog.
NASA is fourth on the list of recommendations.
Other popularly recommended blogs include Fake Science and Star Wars franchise blog.
Humor blogs are highly popular among Tumblr users globally, and some of the most popular ones include Tastefully Offensive, Pleated Jeans, and Know Your Meme.

Tumblr vs. Other Social Networking Platforms

Social Network Usage in the USA

The United States is the most popular user-base for Tumblr and has always been the most popular one as well. However, although the USA generates half of the traffic for Tumblr, the country itself doesn’t rate Tumblr as its most popular platform and falls short by a considerable margin.

Among Teenagers

In 2015, 4% of the teenagers used Tumblr in 2015 as opposed to 29% of teens using Instagram, 21% using Twitter, 12% using Facebook, and 11% using Snapchat.
In 2016, only 2% of the teens in the USA used Tumblr, whereas Snapchat popularity rose to 24%, Instagram reduced to 23%, Twitter was at 16%, and Facebook was at 15%.
Tumblr kept on seeing a reduction in its teenage popularity, holding 1% of the market as Snapchat acquired 39% of the US teen social networking market, Twitter and Facebook had 11% share each and Instagram stayed at 21%.
By 2018, Snapchat was the most popular social network, with 45% of the US market, and Instagram was 26% of the market. Twitter had 9% of the social network app, and Facebook reduced to 8%. Tumblr stayed at 1%.
However, in 2019 as Facebook’s share further reduced to 6% and Instagram popularity increased to 35%, Tumblr now had less than 1% of the market, which for Tumblr was more than 45% of their traffic. Twitter’s share also reduced to 6% over that one year.

User Engagement in Mobile Social Networking Apps

A study in September 2019 conducted in the USA for 20,000 users aged 18 years or older to gauge the popularity of social networking apps in the country by analyzing their user engagement in minutes per month.

Facebook emerged as the leading network with the usage of 769 minutes per month. TikTok was second with 498 minutes of usage every month, Google messenger at 335.51 minutes monthly, followed by WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Instagram, and Snapchat.
However, Tumblr did not even make it to the top 10 social networking apps in the country with just 115.8 minutes of usage per month.

User Engagement in terms of Average Session Duration

The same study mentioned above also determined the average session duration for popular social networking apps.

TikTok topped the list with 10.85 minutes of average session duration in the USA.
Pinterest and Reddit came next at 5.06 and 4.96 minutes on average.
An average Facebook session lasted 4.82 minutes, whereas that of Instagram lasted only 2.95 minutes.
Tumblr, in that regard, had a higher session duration of 4.04 minutes.
However, the difference here was that although Tumblr had higher session duration, the number of sessions was quite low as compared to its popular competitors. Thus Tumblr still placed lower on overall popularity.

Number of Monthly Users

The study also determined the number of monthly users for September among popular apps.

Facebook had the highest number of monthly users of 169.76 million users.
Instagram came second with 121.23 million users, followed by Facebook Messenger at 106.4 million users.
Twitter, although 4^th on the list, had a user base of only 81.47 million users.
Tumblr made it to the 10^th position on the list but only had 16.74 million monthly users.

Financial Growth of Tumblr

Investment

Since it started, there have been five rounds of funding for Tumblr.

The Series A round had 750,000 dollars in funding, while the Series B round accumulated 4.5 million in funding. The investors of Series A round included Sequoia Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Spark Capital.
Series C also roughly gathered 5 million dollars. Series D round was slightly more successful, raking around 30 million dollars.
However, it was the Series E round, which brought in the highest funding of more than 85 million dollars across 10 investors in September 2011.

Revenues

After introducing advertisements, Tumblr made 13 million revenue in 2012.
The company hoped to do 100 million+ revenue in 2013; however, it has never quite risen to task in handling its revenue growth as Yahoo failed to achieve the 100 million mark in 2015 as well, after acquiring Tumblr.
As of the latest 2019 report, the company has done 65 million in revenue, which is a shabby growth from the number of ownerships and funding the company has had.

Revenue Sources

Based on the business model, Tumblr has four revenue sources.

It allows advertisements in the form of sponsored posts by brands that can target specific users based on their demographics. These sponsored posts also appear in the side panel of the website, just like traditional ads.
Another revenue stream is through display ads, which are known as Video Posts on Tumblr. The only difference is that these are in the video format, as opposed to the traditional post format.
Tumblr has a unique revenue model through Sponsored Day, where it allows a business or a brand to pin their logo and tagline to the top of the dashboard and the Explore pages for 24 hours.
The fourth revenue stream is ‘Premium Themes,’ wherein Tumblr offers its users access to a premium theme for their blogs, which can cost anywhere between 9 to 19 dollars.

Conclusion

Since the NSWF ban, Tumblr lost a lot of traction on its website, as well as the app. Users have shifted to platforms where their freedom to express stays unharmed. Although the microblogging platform started on a very high note, the success has been a rollercoaster, and after several big names in the industry have failed to help Tumblr in reaching a stable position in the social networking space. WordPress.com seems to be the final straw in the hat.

The WordPress acquisition of Tumblr at a dirt-cheap rate has not reduced the challenges facing the globally recognized blogging platform. While Tumblr is doing fairly well in its position as a complement to WordPress.com, only the future will reveal the scope of growth for Tumblr and its sustenance in the microblogging world.

Reference Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/040915/how-tumblr-makes-money.asp

https://www.statista.com/statistics/222503/most-popular-blogs-in-the-us-by-hosting-platform/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/815182/tumblr-usage-frequency-usa/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/12/verizon-tumblr-sale-automattic

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261413/distribution-of-tumblr-traffic-by-country/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-to-tumblrcom/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250172/social-network-usage-of-us-teens-and-young-adults/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/579358/most-popular-us-social-networking-apps-ranked-by-engagement/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/221565/total-cumulative-number-of-tumblr-posts/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/579411/top-us-social-networking-apps-ranked-by-session-length/