Tumblr allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.
 

As of April 13, 2013, Tumblr has over 102 million blogs. Its headquarters is located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. 

 

History

 

Founder and CEO,

David Karp

Co-founder and former CTO, Marco Arment

 

Development of Tumblr began sometime in 2006 during a two week gap between contracts at David Karp's software consulting company, Davidville (housed at Karp's former internship with producer/incubator Fred Seibert's Frederator Studios) . Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own tumblelogging platform. Tumblr was launched in February 2007 and within two weeks, the service had gained 75,000 users. Arment left the company in September 2010 to focus on Instapaper. 

 

In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas. Adidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. This launch was only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site. 

 

On December 3, 2012, Tumblr was attacked by a cross-site scripting worm deployed by the Internet troll group Gay Nigger Association of America. The message encouraged users to harm themselves as well as criticizing blogging as a whole. 

 

Features

• Dashboard - The dashboard is the primary tool for the typical Tumblr user. It is a live feed of recent posts from blogs that they follow. Through the dashboard, users are able to comment, reblog, and like posts from other blogs that appear on their dashboard. The dashboard allows the user to upload text posts, images, video, quotes, or links to their blog with a click of a button displayed at the top of the dashboard. Users are also able to connect their blogs to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, so whenever they make a post, it will also be sent as a tweet and a status update. 
 

• Queue - Users are able to set up a schedule to delay posts that they make. They can spread their posts over several hours or even days. 

• Tags - For each post a user creates, they are able to help their audience find posts about certain topics by adding tags. If someone were to upload a picture to their blog and wanted their viewers to find pictures, they would add the tag #picture, and their viewers could use that word to search up posts with the tag #picture.
 

• HTML editing - Tumblr allows users to edit their blog's theme HTML coding to control the appearance of their blog. Users are also able to use a custom domain name for their blog.

 

Mobile

With Tumblr's 2009 acquisition of Tumblerette, an Apple App Store application created by Jeff Rock and Garrett Ross, the service launched its official iPhone app. The site became available to BlackBerry smartphones on April 17, 2010 via a Mobelux application in the BlackBerry App World. In June 2012, Tumblr released a new version of its iOS app, Tumblr 3.0 allowing support for Spotify, hi-res images and offline access. An app for Android is also available. The Windows Phone app was released on April 23, 2013. 

 

Editorial content

In May 2012, Tumblr launched Storyboard, a blog managed by an in-house editorial team which features stories and videos about noteworthy blogs and users on Tumblr. In April 2013, Storyboard was shut down. 

 

Usage

• As of September 2011, the website received more than 13 billion views per month. 

• As of April 2013, 76.5 million posts were created on the site each day. 

• As of April 13, 2013, Tumblr had over 102.6 million blogs and more than 44.6 billion total posts. 

 

An analysis by AddThis of shares through their service in 2011 noted that Tumblr sharing had increased by 1299.5%. 

The service is most popular with the teen and college-aged user segments with half of Tumblr's visitor base being under the age of 25. 

 

Finances

Funding

Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, and Sequoia Capital (among other investors). Tumblr shares two lead investors with Twitter. President and COO John Maloney was the founder of UrbanBaby with wife Susan Maloney.

 

The company had a $800 million valuation in August 2011. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners. 

 

Revenue sources

In an interview with Nicole Lapin of "Bloomberg West" on September 7, 2012, David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr, said the site was monetized by advertising, and he argued that with the high number of users of the service, advertisers would start to look seriously spending money there. Their first advertising launch started in May 2012 after 16 experimental campaigns.

 

Tumblr made $13 million in revenue in 2012 and hopes to make $100 million in 2013. So far, Tumblr has taken $125 million in funding from its backers. Tumblr reportedly spent $25 million to fund operations last year.

 

During the first half of 2013, Tumblr, Inc will allow companies to pay to promote their own posts to a larger audience. Tumblr Head of Sales, Lee Brown, states that the average ad purchase on Tumblr is just under six figures. Brown also states that this functionality will lead Tumblr to profitability in 2013.Tumblr also generates revenue by selling themes to users to change the appearance of their blog.

 

Criticism

Tumblr has received criticism for the ability of bloggers to violate copyright. Tumblr's visual appeal has made it a haven for photoblogs, which often times include copyrighted works from others and publishing them without payment. Tumblr users are able to post content that isn't their own by "Re-blogging". “Re-blogging” involves pressing a button that allows users to re-post content that they found on a blog which they subscribe to, onto their own blog. 

 

Tumblr has also been criticized because a large portion of the platform's traffic is driven by adult content. Tumblr is the perfect vehicle for image porn: It displays lots of photos in large formats with few words and lots of tags and referrals for viewers who want more in the same vein. While mainstream advertisers with real money are sitting on the sidelines, porn bloggers are earning money by referring traffic to adult businesses through referrals and widgets. In a study done by Web.App Storm using the free search keyword tool from SEOBook.com, they found that the vast majority of search terms for the microblogging platform were porn related. Including three in the top ten. In addition, "Tumblr Porn" searches on Google have risen in pretty much the same dramatic fashion as general interest in Tumblr has increased.

Tumblr has been criticized for over pricing. Tumblr recently attempted to charge $150,000 for a single banner ad on its fashion week site. Tumblr has had spam problems as well. The site recently experienced a chain letter scam that claimed 130,000 victims. 

 

Recognition

• In August 2009, Tumblr's CEO, David Karp, was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek. 

• In August 2010, Tumblr was named as a finalist in Lead411's New York City Hot 125. 

• Celebrities that use Tumblr include Lady Gaga, Zooey Deschanel and John Mayer. Many musicians of bands use Tumblr as well, including Tyler "Telle" Smith of The Word Alive, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy. and members of Motionless in White.

• In 2011, the We are the 99% Tumblr went viral and became the unifying slogan for the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

• On October 21, 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging platform to host President Obama's blog.