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I'm surprised it was only 30%... Per Wikipedia: > As of March 1, 2019, Tumblr hosts over 459 million blogs. As of January 2016, the website had 555 million mon

I'm surprised it was only 30%... Per Wikipedia: > As of March 1, 2019, Tumblr hosts over 459 million blogs. As of January 2016, the website had 555 million monthly visitors. The numbers quoted in the article are barely more charitable. Basically it's about one monthly visitor per blog... which one would assume means the blog owners periodically check what their sites look like. Was anyone actually using Tumblr for anything but porn nowadays?

schwarzmx 8y ago
Presumably, someone has found 459 million other uses for it.
MrEldritch 8y ago
Keep in mind that most of those 459 million blogs were either inactive, or spambots. The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. Funnily enough, the Great Tiddy Ban of 2018 doesn't seem to have actually cut the flood of pornbots by much.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  > The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. For sure, but it doesn't seem to be stopping Tumblr from boasting that it has 461M blogs [0]. Even if we charitably assume that as many as .1% of those are run by real, actual humans, that figure makes Tumblr look like a small platform with not many users -- particularly if, as you've noted, there are still tons of porn bots on it. [0]: http://www.tumblr.com/about http://www.tumblr.com/about
  - MrEldritch 8y ago
    I mean, .1% seems drastically too small to me. I'd guess maybe 1, maybe even as many as 10%, represent actual at-least-somewhat-active users?
    - ddebernardy 8y ago
      You might be right but consider how 10% would mean their typical sites have 10 users per month on average. I'm struggling to imagine ~50 million running a blog that no one -- not even their friends and family -- is visiting. Even 1% active non-spam blogs, meaning 100 visitors per site per month on average, seems unlikely to me.
      - MrEldritch 8y ago
        Keep in mind that every single logged-in user has their own blog, whether they use it or not, whether anyone reads it or not. So, theoretically, "an average of one visitor per blog" would also be entirely consistent with "every single Tumblr view represents an active Tumblr user", because the number of people who visit Tumblr would thereby equal the number of blogs.
fwip 8y ago
Many tumblr users have multiple blogs, also a whole lot of blogs are spambots (who continue to post sex ads).
ungzd 8y ago
> Was anyone actually using Tumblr for anything but porn nowadays? What I've encountered there most frequently is blogs with "atmospheric" photos and images. I always thought that most frequent use for tumblr is the same as pinterest: for collecting pics of the same theme, "moodboards". Of course I've seen nudes there, but almost no real porn, i.e. no photos of sexual intercourse. I've rarely seen blogs entirely of nudes, they were mostly posted amongst other "atmospheric" pics.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I'd also agree that "Tumblr-as-less-shitty-Pinterest" is a pretty major use, as is general "Twitter-without-a-character-limit" usage.
makomk 8y ago
If I recall correctly, every Tumblr account has at least one default blog associated with it, so a bunch of users who are mostly read-only probably technically have blogs there.
dredmorbius 8y ago
The numbers aren't atypical. Reddit has well over one million subreddits, but only counts about 140,000 as "active". https://www.redditinc.com/ https://www.redditinc.com/ http://redditmetrics.com/history http://redditmetrics.com/history I've been looking at Google+ Communities recently and have more insight there. There are ove 8.1 million communities. Over 45% have one, or nil, members. The median membership is 2, the 95%ile is about 118. That said, there are a just over 50 with >1 million members, a couple thousand over 100k, and about 10k over 10k members. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%... Looking at both size and activity, for communities with over: 1,000 members: active w/in 1 week 28,823. Active w/in 1 month 39,301 100 members: active w/in 1 week 63,874. Active w/in 1 month 105,166 https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/aeu977/g_communities_significant_and_recent_activity/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/aeu977/g_communit... And yes, there's a ton of crud in the full 8 million and smaller 105k sets, but also the odd good bits. Source: own and contributed data from Web crawls.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  And that all makes sense - Pareto principle and all. But best I'm aware, Reddit isn't communicating about how many subreddits it has anywhere, let alone on its about page. Tumblr, by contrast, happily boasts its useless number on its about page.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Not everything that can be counted matters. Not everything that matters can be counted. Simple channel counts are an availability heuristic. They provide some information, though less than at first blush. Quality measures are difficult.

schwarzmx 8y ago

Presumably, someone has found 459 million other uses for it.

MrEldritch 8y ago

Keep in mind that most of those 459 million blogs were either inactive, or spambots. The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. Funnily enough, the Great Tiddy Ban of 2018 doesn't seem to have actually cut the flood of pornbots by much.

ddebernardy 8y ago
> The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. For sure, but it doesn't seem to be stopping Tumblr from boasting that it has 461M blogs [0]. Even if we charitably assume that as many as .1% of those are run by real, actual humans, that figure makes Tumblr look like a small platform with not many users -- particularly if, as you've noted, there are still tons of porn bots on it. [0]: http://www.tumblr.com/about http://www.tumblr.com/about
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I mean, .1% seems drastically too small to me. I'd guess maybe 1, maybe even as many as 10%, represent actual at-least-somewhat-active users?
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    You might be right but consider how 10% would mean their typical sites have 10 users per month on average. I'm struggling to imagine ~50 million running a blog that no one -- not even their friends and family -- is visiting. Even 1% active non-spam blogs, meaning 100 visitors per site per month on average, seems unlikely to me.
    - MrEldritch 8y ago
      Keep in mind that every single logged-in user has their own blog, whether they use it or not, whether anyone reads it or not. So, theoretically, "an average of one visitor per blog" would also be entirely consistent with "every single Tumblr view represents an active Tumblr user", because the number of people who visit Tumblr would thereby equal the number of blogs.

fwip 8y ago

Many tumblr users have multiple blogs, also a whole lot of blogs are spambots (who continue to post sex ads).

ungzd 8y ago

> Was anyone actually using Tumblr for anything but porn nowadays? What I've encountered there most frequently is blogs with "atmospheric" photos and images. I always thought that most frequent use for tumblr is the same as pinterest: for collecting pics of the same theme, "moodboards". Of course I've seen nudes there, but almost no real porn, i.e. no photos of sexual intercourse. I've rarely seen blogs entirely of nudes, they were mostly posted amongst other "atmospheric" pics.

MrEldritch 8y ago
I'd also agree that "Tumblr-as-less-shitty-Pinterest" is a pretty major use, as is general "Twitter-without-a-character-limit" usage.

makomk 8y ago

If I recall correctly, every Tumblr account has at least one default blog associated with it, so a bunch of users who are mostly read-only probably technically have blogs there.

dredmorbius 8y ago

The numbers aren't atypical. Reddit has well over one million subreddits, but only counts about 140,000 as "active". https://www.redditinc.com/ https://www.redditinc.com/ http://redditmetrics.com/history http://redditmetrics.com/history I've been looking at Google+ Communities recently and have more insight there. There are ove 8.1 million communities. Over 45% have one, or nil, members. The median membership is 2, the 95%ile is about 118. That said, there are a just over 50 with >1 million members, a couple thousand over 100k, and about 10k over 10k members. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%... Looking at both size and activity, for communities with over: 1,000 members: active w/in 1 week 28,823. Active w/in 1 month 39,301 100 members: active w/in 1 week 63,874. Active w/in 1 month 105,166 https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/aeu977/g_communities_significant_and_recent_activity/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/aeu977/g_communit... And yes, there's a ton of crud in the full 8 million and smaller 105k sets, but also the odd good bits. Source: own and contributed data from Web crawls.

ddebernardy 8y ago
And that all makes sense - Pareto principle and all. But best I'm aware, Reddit isn't communicating about how many subreddits it has anywhere, let alone on its about page. Tumblr, by contrast, happily boasts its useless number on its about page.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Not everything that can be counted matters. Not everything that matters can be counted. Simple channel counts are an availability heuristic. They provide some information, though less than at first blush. Quality measures are difficult.