More bad news from the blogging platform that everybody loves to hate to love: according to measurements taken by Quantcast, traffic to Tumblr’s desktop and mobile websites appear to be going downhill fast this year. Seriously, it’s like 2011 low. Remember what Tumblr was like in 2011? Exactly.
Quantcast is generally thought of as a pretty accurate outside measurement for traffic that a particular website might get. At the beginning of 2013, it reported that Tumblr’s monthly page views were close to 17 billion — prior to this it had hovered consistently around 15 billion for most of 2012. Last month, that number dropped to 4.7 billion. Yikes.
We should stress that the measurements Quantcast reports are generally considered unofficial, and notably fail to take into account the traffic done through mobile apps. The recent popularity of Tumblr’s mobile app that could certainly be getting in the way here — Yahoo reported in May that over half of Tumblr users interacted with the app, on an average of seven times a day. Tumblr also told Buzzfeed that Quantcast is unable to measure new pages when a users sets their blog to infinitely scroll, which is something a lot of Tumblr hipsters like to do.
However, as everybody knows, the easiest way to make money on the Internet is page views — and if Tumblr (and by extension, Yahoo) isn’t getting that, then it could possibly mean we’re going to see more sponsored content all over the place to pick up the slack and make the service profitable. After all, Tumblr does love its brands. Oh, the glorious brands.
(via The Verge)
- Maybe everybody got sick of the constant layout changes
- Yahoo’s probably been questioning this purchase since they announced it
- At least we have plenty of corporate-sponsored GIFs! Whee!
