Tumblr Trivia | 40 facts about the social media platform

Tumblr is a social media platform, that is really popular among young people, because of its general aesthetic.

1. Tumblr  is an American social networking website.
2. It is also considered as microblogging website.
3. Tumblr is stylized as tumblr.
4. It is pronounced as “tumbler”.
5. It was founded by David Karp in 2007.
6. It is currently owned by Automattic.
7. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
8. Users can follow other users’ blogs.
9. Bloggers can also make their blogs private.
10. For bloggers many of the website’s features are accessed from a “dashboard” interface.
11. As of August 12, 2019, Tumblr hosts over 475 million blogs.
12. Development of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between contracts at David Karp’s software consulting company, Davidville (housed at Karp’s former internship with producer-incubator Fred Seibert’s Frederator Studios, which was located a block from Tumblr’s current headquarters).
13. Karp had been interested in tumblelogs for some time.
14. He was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform.
15. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own tumblelogging platform.
16. Tumblr was launched in February 2007.
17. Within two weeks the service had gained 75,000 users.
18. Arment left the company in September 2010 to focus on Instapaper.
19. In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign.
20. This happened in conjunction with Adidas.
21. Addidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard.
22. This launch came only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site
23. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo and Tumblr had reached an agreement
24. Yahoo! Inc. was about to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash.
25. Many of Tumblr’s users were unhappy with the news.
26. This cause some to start a petition, achieving nearly 170,000 signatures.
27. David Karp remained CEO and the deal was finalized on June 20, 2013
28. Advertising sales goals were not met and in 2016 Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr’s value.
29. Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo in June 2017, and placed Yahoo and Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary.
30. Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be leaving Tumblr by the end of the year.
31. Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr’s President and COO, took over leading the company.
32. The site, along with the rest of the Oath division (renamed Verizon Media Group in 2019), continued to struggle under Verizon. In March 2019, SimilarWeb estimated Tumblr had lost 30% of its user traffic since December 2018.
33. In 2013 it was the year when the site had introduced a stricter content policy with heavier restrictions on adult content.
34. In May 2019, it was reported that Verizon was considering selling the site due to its continued struggles since the purchase.
35. Following this news, Pornhub’s vice president publicly expressed interest in purchasing Tumblr, with a promise to reinstate the previous adult content policies.
36. On August 12, 2019, Verizon Media announced that it would sell Tumblr to Automattic—operator of blog service WordPress.com and corporate backer of the open source blog software of the same name—for an undisclosed amount.
37. Axios reported that the sale price was less than $3 million, a significant decrease over Yahoo’s original purchase price.
38. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that the site will operate as a complementary service to WordPress.com.
39. He also mentioned that there were no plans to reverse the content policy decisions made during Verizon ownership.
40. With Tumblr’s 2009 acquisition of Tumblerette, an iOS application created by Jeff Rock and Garrett Ross, the service launched its official iPhone app