Data shows Tumblr overall user number shrinking

"I have exciting and somewhat amazing milestones to share with you," David Kap David Karp, founder and chief executive of Tumblr, said in an Employee blog section last November, according to U.S. media reports. Tumblr has become one of the 10 largest websites in the United States and now has a global number of 170 million users. "This blog contains the chart provided by analyst company Quantcast, Quantcast says Tumblr allows it to" directly "compute its traffic.

We didn't know at the time that Tumblr might be trying to attract buyers. A few months later, Yahoo bought the company at more than 1 billion dollars because of its growth potential. Yahoo CEO Mayer Marissa Mayer in May: "The growth of the consumer technology industry has always started with traffic." "Tumblr users are young people with a scientific mind, but more importantly, they have a large number. As a result, Quantcast is an interesting figure in the global monthly number of independent visitors.

The peak of traffic occurred in November last year. A subsequent chart shows the weekly flow of traffic since May, with the peak appearing on May 20, the day Tumblr announced the acquisition. Although Tumblr used to tout Quantcast's numbers, the "direct calculation" approach means that Quantcast records traffic with Tumblr support, which should not be taken seriously. Quantcast said it would not comment on individual customers, but Tumblr in response to the query: "Quantcast's chart does not fully account for our data because it does not include our mobile application traffic, the length of the site, or the fact that all pages are not recorded because of the AJAX page load." ”

This may be the point: mobile application traffic is the main source of growth for many big web companies. The second chart shows that mobile Internet traffic-not provided by the application-shows its importance. But Tumblr did not answer when asked whether statistics on mobile apps would be known about overall growth.

"In terms of mobility, more than half of Tumblr users use their mobile apps," Meyer said in a takeover statement. "But the problem is not mobile growth but overall growth." Facebook has grown 51% from last year's mobile subscriber base, but the total user base has grown by only 21%. More to the point: Facebook's active mobile subscribers grew 68 million in the last quarter, but the site as a whole included only about 50 million per cent of mobile users.

Tumblr are functionally different from Facebook, and many months "independent" users are not really aware that they are using Tumblr; they may visit a Tumblr blog, but they will not use the site. Tumblr's mobile users are almost always exclusively's website users, which means they have accounts, which means they may occasionally also visit the site on their computers. So how do we look at this problem? Quantcast's rival, comscore, shows that Tumblr's multiplatform growth curve has been largely flat in the past three months.

BuzzFeed network data show that the Tumblr recommended a serious decline. Mobile apps growth does not cause the desktop and mobile internet to shrink--fast-growing assets such as Tumblr can probably grow at the same time as application and desktop use. But the data suggest that Tumblr's internet business (at least the main part) is not growing but shrinking. There is a big difference between buying a user and buying growth, and Yahoo may be just doing it for the former.