Tumblr has almost doubled in size since last fall. Back in September 2011, the blogging service hosted 28 million blogs containing a total of 10 billion blog posts. Today, Tumblr has passed 50 million blogs, and its users have produced more than 20 billion blog posts (according to Tumblr’s About page).
Tumblr’s user base currently crams out around 55 million posts per day. While not quite at Facebook levels (on the other hand, what is?), the current pace still amounts to an impressive amount of content:
- 637 posts per second
- 38,194 posts per minute
- 2.3 million posts per hour
- 385 million posts per week
- 1.65 billion posts per month
- 20 billion posts per year
At this pace, Tumblr will be hosting in excess of 35 billion posts by the end of 2012. However, since the number of Tumblr blogs is growing, the number of posts could well become significantly higher than our prediction here. After all, Tumblr is adding around 120,000 new blogs each day (based on the year so far).
Tumblr’s massive growth in 2011 continues
Looking in the rear view mirror a bit, it’s clear that Tumblr has been on a roll for quite some time now. The service had an amazing 2011 in terms of growth, more than tripling in size over the year (comparing January 2012 with January 2011).
- Tumblr went from 12 to 41 million blogs in 2011 (29 million added).
- Tumblr users created more than 13 billion blog posts in 2011.
- The total number of posts on Tumblr grew by 500%.
And it looks like 2012 might be as strong or even stronger.
As an interesting historical footnote, compare the current numbers with the fledgling years of Tumblr. The numbers back in January 2009, when Tumblr was just under two years old, were:
- 642,000 blogs (which would take 5-6 days to add now).
- A total of 71 million posts (less than 2 days of posts now).
- 185,000 posts per day (about 5 minutes worth of posts today).
Tumblr, a page view machine
All this content that populates Tumblr will of course result in a massive number of page views, all of which has to be served by Tumblr’s own infrastructure. According to Quantcast, Tumblr is currently serving more than 16 billion page views per month.
Since the service has grown so quickly, Tumblr’s engineers have had quite a challenge on their hands scaling software and hardware to meet the growing demand. This was noticeable in a blog platform survey we performed last year, where Tumblr had some uptime issues. That said, they also showed improved stability compared to the year before, so things are going in the right direction.
However, these challenges are born out of success, so we highly doubt the people over at Tumblr have too many complaints.
