If you remember your credentials, it might be worth it log into your Tumblr account once again: You may surprisingly find that some of the users you once followed are still active and that the microblogging platform founded in 2007 is livelier than you expected.
Not only: according to data disclosed by the CEO, Jeff D’Onofrio, to the New Yorker, 48% of active Tumblr users and 61% of new subscribers are members of Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010.
Against all odds, the old Tumblr is taking over segment of the population that some social media giants are terrified of losing: teenagers on Facebook have fallen by 13% in the last two years and are expected to drop by a further 45% between now and 2023; even Instagram starts showing some creaking and as revealed in the Facebook Papers, the amount of content posted by teens dropped 13% in just one year.
The ranking
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While the largest social company in the world fears it will lose its most coveted user bracket, thanks to Gen Z, the little Tumblr has seen profits grow by 55% from July 2021 to today. How is it possible? After reaching the pinnacle of success in the early 2010s (mainly thanks to the pioneering multimedia approach, able to seamlessly integrate images, photographs, videos and gifs), Tumblr was bought in 2013 by Yahoo for a billion dollars.
A little because of the rise of Facebook and Instagram, a little because of the overall crisis of Yahoo, Tumblr soon began to lose altitude to rivals. In December 2018 it received another deadly blow when Yahoo decided to ban all explicit content on the platform, suddenly causing a traffic drop of over 30%. The following year, the platform was sold to Automattic, the commercial arm of Wordpress, for just $ 3 million.
Still, none of this resulted in Tumblr’s demise. Of course, in absolute terms the numbers are small: if 500 million tweets per day appear on Twitter, on Tumblr, there are only 11 million daily posts. And although in the last two years the registered blogs have grown by 30 million, reaching 520, it is not known how many of these are still active. One thing is certain: Tumblr is still alive and benefiting from being an outsider on the social landscape.
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A road of its own
The platform founded by David Karp is probably the only one not to have introduced the Stories, not to chase the innovations launched by TikTok, to show the posts in chronological and not algorithmic order. Tumblr stands out because it’s not desperately trying to keep up with the latest generation social media, but accepts the role of a classic blog platform with a vintage charm. That’s not all, because on Tumblr you can feel the sensation of being disconnected from what characterizes all the other social networks: influencers and personal branding, trending topics and controversies of the day.
It is the place where the most bizarre phenomena of Internet culture still find their place: come on bronies (who are adult fans of My Little Pony) to the otherkin, that is people who identify themselves as non-human, as well as a whole series of extravagant phenomena: “It’s the periphery of the Internet, where nothing important happens”, summed up in the New Yorker a 21-year-old who runs a blog in which post gifs and memes on the tv series Succession.
In many ways, Tumblr represents a dip into a more naïve and light-hearted past of social networks. And it is precisely this that, in its small way, is keeping him alive.