Today, Tumblr announced that it had finally broken into the top 10 US websites, according to a third-party analysis by measurement firm Quantcast. However, there has been some skepticism regarding the claim.
A post from Tumblr CEO David Karp said that the site now boasts a worldwide audience of 170 million people. Instead of explaining what this means in context, he linked to Quantcast’s website which shows 202,637,856 visits to Tumblr per month in the US alone, and 616,776,768 visits worldwide. Reach in terms of users per month was 60,803,592 in the US and 168,243,984 worldwide, a bit lower than Tumblr’s announced data.
Tumblr reported itself as a top 10 website, but it’s actually ranked at #15. It is the #9 network, and has a “top ten” badge by Quantcast, and TechCrunch believes that Tumblr merely mistook that to mean that they had achieved top 10 status as a website. Top 10 websites and top 10 networks are different measurements.
Additionally, comScore’s October rankings (which looks at unique visitors) put Tumblr at #40. To put this in social media context, Facebook is #4, LinkedIn is #24 and Twitter is #25. That ranking notes that not all traffic might be accounted for, saying “entity has assigned some portion of its traffic to other syndicated entities.”
UPDATE: Karp seems to have realized his mistake, and has posted the following clarification to David’s Log:
“Scratch that [the earlier post]: I anxiously published this post this morning, not sure if we would hold on to the #10 spot when the rankings refreshed this afternoon.
Turns out the holiday pushed us to #9! 🙂 “
Turns out Tumblr was a bit too anxious to report their ranking news and jumped the gun. Honest mistake, Mr. Karp. It happens to the best of us!
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