The latest social-media phenomenon, Tumblr, continues to post astounding traffic metrics.

Founder and CEO David Karp spoke at the DLD conference in Munich this morning, where he reiterated some of the company’s recent milestones:

• 100 million uniques per month 
• 15 billion pageviews per month

24 January 14 Permalink

There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.

[…]

 Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.

[…]

But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.

24 January 38 Permalink