Is Tumblr back? The blogging platform’s heyday ended years ago but its cultural influence seems to be on the rise once again. At the start of the year, Vogue declared the return of the Tumblr girl aesthetic. A fortnight later, The New Yorker published a company profile. Most surprising of all, Tumblr says that it is popular with Generation Z. Almost half its active users are aged 25 or under.
A Tumblr revival would be fitting in the midst of Y2K nostalgia. Like flip phones and low-rise denim, it evokes the early 2000s. Its relevance would be a nasty surprise to social media giants like Facebook, too. It might even make Tumblr a takeover target.
The problem is finding the data that backs this up. As a private company, Tumblr is allowed to be cagey about numbers. It will only say that it has more than 500m blogs. Go to the platform and it is clear that many of the blogs are posted by young users, which supports Tumblr’s Gen Z claim. The most popular film with the platform’s fandom, for example, is the Disney animation Charm.
Yet according to estimates by analytics firm SimilarWeb, there were just over 300m monthly visits to Tumblr in December 2021. That is down about 80m in two years. It may have gained new young users but it is still losing older ones. To put those numbers in context, Facebook has an estimated 21bn monthly visits.
Interest in Tumblr seems connected instead to wistful feelings about the sort of internet it represents: creative, chaotic and anonymous. Unlike YouTube, it does not have an algorithm that forces users towards certain content. Account holders have to search out the content they like. Unlike Instagram, creators tend not to show themselves, meaning the focus is less on appearance.
Of course, these are all reasons Tumblr has struggled. Anonymity means it cannot offer the sort of targeted advertising that made Meta, aka Facebook, $9bn of profit in the last quarter. TikTok’s scrolling videos and spookily good algorithm require less effort from users. In terms of audience and revenue, it is hopelessly outmatched by the big social network groups.
That is a shame. Founded in 2007 by then 20-year-old New Yorker David Karp, Tumblr was promoted as a place of creativity. In a 2011 interview with Inc. magazine Karp seems remarkably balanced. Being on computers all the time made him feel “gross”, he said. Instead of sketching out plans for world domination and user monetisation, he outlined his reasons for keeping Tumblr simple. “Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can over encumber and destroy a product.”
This attitude could be felt on the platform. For a brief moment, some time between 2012 and 2015, Tumblr was a formative gateway to the internet for millions of young users. It was an introduction to the in-jokes, ideas and connections of life online.
What happened next was a horror show that start-ups should remember when courted by companies that might not understand their product. In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1bn, with chief executive Marissa Mayer promising not to “screw it up”. But the memes and hyper-specific interests on Tumblr did not mesh with Yahoo’s mainstream advertising plans. Users began to depart for more slick platforms such as Instagram. In 2016, Yahoo wrote down Tumblr’s value by more than $700m.
Two years later came the ban on pornographic content following reports of abusive material. Tumblr’s user base plummeted. Automattic, owner of blogging platform WordPress, fished it out of the bargain bin. The price tag was reported as less than $3m — 0.3 per cent of its value just six year earlier.
The decline was humiliating. But renewed interest in Tumblr suggests that at least it landed in the right place. The New Yorker described the platform as an Atlantis of social networks. But unlike the mythical underwater city, Tumblr is real. Perhaps its growing visibility will encourage user growth.
Automattic is known as a buyer that does not try to squeeze every last dollar of potential revenue from an acquisition. But chief executive Matt Mullenweg has talked of experimentation. Tumblr’s digital artwork might be the perfect fit for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
Niche groups support contextual advertising, the strategy that Reddit promotes. Tumblr is trying out subscriptions too, letting creators put some content behind paywalls for a $9.99 per month fee. These are careful, sensible steps. A Reddit-sized initial public offering is unlikely to be on the cards any time soon. But the internet still has room for Tumblr’s quirks.
elaine.moore@ft.com