Marketing on Tumblr: Where It Helps to Be Honest (And Weird)

Background

In the introduction, Tumblr was referred to as one of the major social media platforms. That label would surprise many people, who often leave it out of discussions of the most important social media players. Tumblr was founded in 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment. In 2013, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion (Statista, 2015). Tumblr is known as a microblogging platform, and accordingly, each user is described as having his or her own blog. An early assessment of the site described it thusly:

This platform style, off-the-cuff but media-rich, proved popular. Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing major platforms (along with Pinterest), with nearly 100% active user growth between 2014 – 2015 (Cohen, 2015). During 2014, it registered nearly twice Instagram's growth rate for active users (Luden, 2014). Higher growth rates are easier for smaller companies, of course. Tumblr's information page (http://www.tumblr.com/about) states that it hosts approximately 260 million blogs with 122 billion posts, as of late 2015. Individual users may own multiple blogs, so the number of users would be somewhat smaller than that 260 million figure. While that is a large group of users, there are bigger platforms yet. Here stands one understandable reason for Tumblr's historic lack of attention compared to the even larger platforms of Instagram, Twitter, or the true behemoth, Facebook.