A decade ago, Tumblr was the cool social media platform on the block. It was very popular with middle school, high school, and undergraduate-age Internet users. It even seemed like a useful place to promote yourself or your personal brand, but in more recent years it seems as if it’s not as talked about as it used to be. Despite hosting 539 million blogs as of July 2021, what exactly happened to the micro-blogging giant and why is it not successful as it was in the early-to-mid-2010s? Have the kids simply moved on to new horizons to get their fix of hilarious gifs, or are there certainly marketing tactics that have backfired and resulted in the corporation failing to drive traffic these days? This Los Angeles social media agency has answers.
First, let’s rewind for a little bit and briefly learn about the history of the website. Tumblr was founded in early 2007 (Almost 15 years ago! Wow!) by David Karp. While it took a couple of years to hit the mainstream, within the first two weeks since the official launch it already attracted 75,000 users. Not bad! Users love Tumblr because of how customizable it was. You could copy and paste using your own custom layout on your blog which made it super addictive. Its ability to allow the users to make their experience super personalizable made it similar to the former social media giant MySpace in that regard. In June 2013, Karp sold Tumblr to Yahoo. And then they sold it to Oath in 2017, and they sold it to Verizon in 2019, and then Verizon sold it to Automatic (the owner of WordPress) that same year. Yeah, you can definitely see where things are going from here. To make matters even worse, Tumblr’s current owner bought the website for only $3 million, despite it previously being purchased for $1.1 billion by Yahoo. Yikes.
There are several problems with Tumblr. For one, there is a significant limit to video uploading. Statistically speaking, people spend an average of 2.6x more time on a page with a video. Unfortunately, the cat gifs are only going to get you so far. People love their videos, and that’s why YouTube is the second most visited website in the entire world, with the average person spending 21 minutes a day watching videos (21 minutes x 365 = 7665 minutes = 5.32291667 days per year). These facts alone make it apparent why TikTok has taken off as well as it has. While you can upload videos up to 5 minutes long on Tumblr, they cannot exceed a size of 100MB. On TikTok, videos cannot be longer than 3 minute, but they allow up to 287.6 MB in file size. Most videos uploaded to Tumblr are usually links from YouTube. This is good to bring even more traffic to YouTube, but not so much to bringing traffic to content that originated on Tumblr.
Another issue with Tumblr was a big decision made in December 2018. During this time, Tumblr decided to make the platform family-friendly and auto-flagging content that was deemed “sensitive.” However, no algorithm is perfect, and Tumblr’s was way off. Many people creating blogs that were even G-rated were flagged. While many popular websites do not allow content that is not suitable for underage users, namely Facebook and Instagram, it’s Tumblr deciding to drastically alter the image – and doing so in a very unstrategic manner – that ultimately hurt them.This incident served as a public relations disaster for Tumblr.
Brand consistency is extremely important for your online presence. While we encourage you to make improvements to your brand as you bloom as an entrepreneur, making substantial, contrasting changes may hurt you in more than one way. Think of it this way: if you open a gluten-free bakery and have already established a loyal clientbase, they will probably be upset if you decide to scrap this and decide that gluten-free goodies aren’t hip anymore. You could try to expand your clientbase by adding gluten products to the menu, but this would probably damage your image if people have always known you as the gluten-free bakery in town. It’s no secret that you can’t please everyone, but if you significantly upset your clientbase, you won’t only find yourself with less profit but with less clicks on your website and engagement on your social media pages, and this, as you can already imagine, is a big red flag.
Changing your image too drastically can also hurt you in SEO rankings. Ask any of the social media agencies in Los Angeles and they’ll tell you so! If your primary keyword has “best dog groomer Orange County,” but you decided to rebrand as a general pet store, you might still get some hits, but the Internet does not simply forget what has already been done (for better or for worse!). Google will likely still cache Lucky’s Pet Store as Lucky’s Dog Groomer, and even if you announce your re-branding on Facebook, both the search engines and your audience will likely be confused. We understand that sometimes brand changes are necessary for legal and financial reasons, but we recommend doing this as a final resort only for the sake of your SEO rankings and your client loyalty. This will put your competitors at a considerable advantage, and you may find yourself in the dust compared to them as you fight for that spot on the first page of a Google search result.
So what? What does your favorite Los Angeles social media agency think you can learn from Tumblr? While it is probably not your first choice in social media marketing, and even if you’re not looking to launch the next big social media site, there is a lot that you as an entrepreneur looking to drive traffic to your website or your social media pages can take away from this story. Firstly, it is very important to stay up-to-date with the times. It can sound like a major chore, but the truth is that in the digital age, if you want your business to succeed, you will have to do this. Tumblr failed to keep up with many of the latest trends from its user base, resulting in them to migrate elsewhere.