
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.
What do you think?