Is Tumblr a blog or a social network site?
I used to be an active user on Tumblr. Speaking of Tumblr, I would like to talk about some of my experience and impressions for Tumblr. Years ago, I was a Tumblr user, I use it because my old friend recommended me to use this and share our works together. I like how it can blog with unlimited words, add pictures and gifs between the paragraphs, and interact or communicate with other users online. So I used Tumblr to post my artworks and doodles online, and I am glad that I have met some friends that have the same interest as me from this platform.
But what I don't like Tumblr for that time is because I received a lot of adult content private messages, and more than half of my followers are porn users even that none of my posts has any adult contain. Most disturbing is some of them posted pornographic website under my post comment, this makes me uncomfortable, so I deleted my previous account and stopped using it. However, when I came back to Tumbler nowadays, I'm quite happy about the decreasing of adult content compared to the past, but the users are getting lesser as well, even that I am still feeling fine with a platform that is not so popular, so I can just share my works as a record for of life, like an online Diary.
Research on Tumblr Tumblr used to be one of the top ten famous websites in the United States, and it dropped to 46th today.
Tumblr is owned by David Karp in 2007, and now by Automattic.
In the year 2011, there is a lot of youngsters being aged under 25 were using and visiting Tumblr. In that year, while LinkedIn and Twitter are growing gradually, Tumblr has doubled its monthly users in a year (Boyd, 2011). This is because it allows users to create custom blogs and publish multimedia and text as their posts, which allow other users to comment, like or republish on their posts. Users can also follow the blogs that they are interested too, so they can communicate or just follow each other.
According to Stringfellow (2013), it has a lot of entrepreneur users are using Tumblr for their businesses. In the year 2013, with almost a third of the Interbrand Top 100 brands with active Tumblr account in the amount of more than 161 million Tumblr blogs and 70 billion posts of it.
But after the changed hands, again and again, it seems like its popularity is falling down these three years. So, it could be understood that most of the young generations today are not using Tumblr for their blogging.
("Global social media ranking 2019 | Statista", 2019)
So, Is Tumblr a blog or a social network site? In my opinion, I think that Tumblr is a combination of social networking and blogs, just like Facebook plus Blogger. Besides Tumblr, I played Facebook and Blogger as well, and I think Tumblr is a combination of this two, which Facebook as a social network, and Blogger as a blog.
Why I'm saying Tumblr is a social network site is because it has a similar private communication box (Chatbox) as Facebook(Messenger box), which allows users to message and share information privately. Tumblr will recommend the blogs that have similar interests with the users, as Facebook does for their pages. But Facebook's posts have a word limits for a post, which Tumblr doesn't.
On the other hand, the similarities of Tumblr and Blogger is both of them did not have word limits. They also have the same functions such as can post audio, video, gifs and so on. These can improve a blog post more friendly and attractive compare to a wordy one. Besides, they do have a lot of different templates to choose or download from another website or even can edit the HTML. However, what is lacking in Blogger is they don't have a chatbox or tools that allow them to communicate online.
So, my conclusion is Tumblr as both blog and social network site because it has both functions for unlimited writing and communicating. Tumblr is a fun website for me as it can write and share a lot of things, and I also discovered a lot of knowledge and interesting works from different people. Even though it is not many users as before, however, the contents are still fun and fascinating, most importantly it is easy to use.
References:
tumblr.com Traffic Statistics. (2019). Retrieved 28 September 2019, from https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com#social
Boyd, S. (2011). Andrew Lipsman, The Network Effect: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & Tumblr Reach New Heights in May. Retrieved 25 September 2019, from https://medium.com/stowe-boyd/andrew-lipsman-the-network-effect-facebook-linkedin-twitter-tumblr-reach-new-heights-in-may-fc34822e36c
Global social media ranking 2019 | Statista. (2019). Retrieved 28 September 2019, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Stringfellow, A. (2013). The Great Tumblr Debate: Blogging Platform Or Social Network?. Retrieved 27 September 2019, from https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/the-great-tumblr-debate-blogging-platform-or-social-network/
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