Tumblr now hosts more blogs than WordPress.com, despite having existed for half the time of its competitor.
According to Tumblr’s info page, the site hosts more than 20.9 million total blogs, up from 7 million in January. By contrast, WordPress.com’s stats reveal that the platform powers 20.8 million Web sites. Tumblr was founded in 2007, while WordPress has been around since 2003.
WordPress.com hosts a number of high-profile sites, such as the NFL, CNN, and TED. However, Mashable notes that a surge of big-name brands in entertainment, news, and fashion have recently flocked to Tumblr, which features a much heavier focus on social media compared to WordPress’ longer-form content. Considering the rapid-fire growth of the social media universe, and the ease with which Tumblr allows users to link to other social sites, Tumblr’s increasing popularity is not a huge surprise.
To put the influence of social media into perspective, it’s rumored that Facebook is nearing 700 million members and Twitter supposedly has more than 300 million users. Both sites maintain that their official numbers stand at 500 million and 200 million, respectively.
Mark Coatney, a Tumblr employee who helps news sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times get their Tumblr pages off the ground, explained to NPR why Tumblr is so popular.
“It’s more almost like, you know, an email experience in a way,” he said. “You’ll dash off an email or do a tweet or something like that because it’s quick and easy, so it’s kind of taking that thinking and applying it to blogging. It kind of speaks to what I think is a new and emerging thing in journalism, which is kind of talking to your audience on a peer-to-peer level as opposed to the broadcast model where you put it out and people consume it.”
WordPress.com suffered a few security breaches earlier this year, but it’s unclear if the attacks affected the site’s numbers.
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