Tumblr's explosion could signal alternative to Twitter

Tumblr’s growth is astonishing. TechCrunch has reported that Tumblr has “north of 8.4 billion monthly pageviews”.

So what does that mean for Tumblr’s numbers? Well, throw that 250 million pageviews a day out the windows. Last Thursday, Tumblr hit 400 million pageviews for the day, Karp tells us. It’s close to 5,000 pageviews a second, he notes.

This report and others like it which point to Tumblr’s explosive growth got me thinking about Tumblr versus Twitter.

Twitter is a little difficult to measure because, unlike Tumblr which probably sees most of its traffic going to the tumblr.com, Twitter users use the twitter.com site as well as a number of apps which tie into Twitter’s service. There are some numbers in a recent TechCrunch report which point to 190 million visitors a month and 65 million tweets a day but its not clear whether those visitors are twitter.com visitors or all Twitter users.

As @za5 pointed out, you can’t compare Tumblr and Twitter directly, but what I am more interested in is the trend a comparison may reveal. If Tumblr becomes more popular than Twitter in real terms it could signal a shift away from Twitter’s very short form and fragmented approach to sharing and a preference for the sort of rich content, templated form Tumblr provides users with. What Tumblr lacks is a well developed identity system and social graph like Twitter’s. That is a key component, for sure, but a nicely integrated content sharing platform adds a lot of value to the mix.

Just a thought. Even if incomplete.