Tumblr breaks 20 billion posts in record time

Just four months after hitting 12 billion posts, Tumblr whizzes through another blogging milestone

Tumblr hit a sizable milestone this week -- the 20 billionth post. As more individuals, brands and other collectives have adopted Tumblr as a great way to share photos, multimedia and other funny tidbits, the blogging service has shown tremendous growth since it broke the 12 billionth post in November of last year. 

The Tumblr Twitter handle announced the milestone Wednesday morning, stating: “Forgot to make a big deal of this earlier, but Tumblr crossed the 20-billion-post mark Monday night.” 

The microblogging and photo-sharing trend has been a great boon to Tumblr over the past two years. Back in June, Tumblr announced it surpassed WordPress with the most posted blogs.

WordPress currently runs north of 72 million blogs, nearly half of which are hosted on WordPress.com, while Tumblr's shorter blog structure has fewer blogs but substantially more posts and views because of the viral sharing strength that has become the Tumblr phenomena. 

The New York City-based company explained at the start of the year that it was experiencing 15 billion pageviews every month.

One driver of the views and social viral aspect of the site is the re-blogging feature that shares a given post to more and more viewers at a rapid pace.

And while Tumblr’s main audience originates from within the U.S, with nearly half of visitors (249 million), Brazil also is catching up as a strong traffic and usership driver with 49 million monthly visits, and the UK hovers around for 34 million visits. To date, Tumblr has seen more 560 million people view content on its networks.

The strength of Tumblr was also shown in a recent Pew study: State of the Media 2012 report — where the blogging site was second only to Facebook.

The study found that Facebook users spent an average of 423 minutes in December scrolling through the social networking site. Tumblr came in second, with 151 minutes of time spent looking at blog posts for the month. Pinterest was third in time on site (80 minutes) and MySpace beat out Google+ with 13 minutes to the new social network's 5 minutes.

Tumblr snagged a $85 million round of financing back in September, making the total funding for the company $125 million.

Silicon Valley venture capital firms had been hesitant in the past to fund the company since Tumblr's valuation and business model have not been publicly disclosed, but the site has gained national and pop culture attention since stars such as Katy Perry and Lady Gaga have blogged with the service.
 
Since its launch over four years ago, Tumblr, whose founder David Karp remains on as the CEO, has been in studies, including one by Nielsen, that credit the site with more than tripling its audience just in the past year. Also in the same Nielsen report, Tumblr received the highest representation of female teens out of the nine social network sites studied.

Indeed Tumblr has emerged as the one-to-watch player in the blogging space. Tumblr shares the blogging space sites WordPress, Six Apart and Blogger, but has made a space for itself by capitalizing on the ease of updating new posts mobility and connecting to other posts on the site that have similar tags.

At the time I am writing this article the number of posts had surpassed 49 million total blogs and 51 million posts had already gone live today. At this pace, I can bet the 50 billionth post will arrive before Independence Day.