As of this writing, Tumblr reports having close to 2.5 million publishers. That’s roughly 1 million for every year they’ve existed. Not bad for a company founded by a high-school dropout.
Some History
Tumblr is the brain-child of David Karp, who dropped out of high-school at 15 to pursue his web development career. At 21, he raised $750,000 in first-round funding for his blogging platform, including an angel investment from another darling of the NY geek scene Jakob Lodwick. According to an October 2007 article on Business Insider:
We believe but can’t confirm that this is Jakob’s first angel investment; in retrospect it shouldn’t be a shock, as he’s an avid Tumblr user. In a separate but related development, David tells us that Vimeo and Tumblr are planning a “deep integration” that will make sending Vimeo video to Tumblr sites seamless
The irony there, of course, is that Lodwick was fired from Vimeo a couple months later, but that’s neither the point, nor tremendously surprising (he’s a little bit nuts).
From there to a couple months ago when they shared some of their stats with the world, they got huge. Really huge. However questionable the self-reported data might be, there is certainly no doubt that they have a lot of users and, even more impressive, a really high retention rate. They’ve thrown numbers as high as 85% of new users post on a regular basis (which is way, way, way more than, for example, twitter).
So, is it really that awesome?
It is, kind of. I have always like using Tumblr. There is really no barrier to entry at all, and a quick browse of random tumblogs will prove that. In their summary of the company CrunchBase says:
There is little to no learning curve involved in using tumblr. Features are intuitive and quick to establish. Users simply sign up and begin posting in a minute.
And that’s the truth, but for as much as people love to say stuff like that, it only matters to a fraction of the audience. I am a web designer, so it pains me to say some of this. As intuitive and friendly as a user interface might be, all that ensures is quick uptake, and even that is mostly because people like me, who want to believe that those things really do matter, see it and say “wow, that’s so intuitive and friendly, this thing is going to be huge.” For the kids, sadly, it’s still all about who’s who. If you’ve ever read Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point,’ you’ll know what I’m talking about. At the end of the day, Tumblr got so popular because it got so popular. It became uncool to not have a tumblog.