Tumblr Is Not What You Think

Tumblr Is Not What You Think

 

Editor’s note: Adam Rifkin is co-founder and CEO of PandaWhale, an online network of interesting things and people. You can follow him on Twitter @ifindkarma.
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.
What are the young and restless doing on Tumblr all day? The answer is more complicated than it first appears and speaks to the continuing importance of the public web in the era of the walled garden.
For a long time, I thought of Tumblr as topic-based image blogging: In other words, self-expression through collecting pictures of a particular type of thing. Hence I thought that the iconic Tumblrs were Things Organized Neatly, Girls in Yoga Pants (NSFW) and Food on my Dog. Tumblr itself gives the impression that this is the main use-case for its service by highlighting almost exclusively this type of Tumblog in The Tumblr Directory.
ALL WRONG. Or rather, some of these Tumblrs are necessary for the system to work but, surprisingly, only a small percentage of them.
Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.
But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.
Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.

Jadid Tech