Tumblr vs Pinterest

In the left corner, the blog platform weighing in at 15 billion monthly pageviews, and in the right, the social photo sharing site with 11 million monthly pageviews. (In case you don't know, here is a good intro to Pinterest.) They seem pretty different right? Wrong.

Well, kind of wrong. Tumblr is still a blogging platform - as much as you can use it as a loose collection of inspiration it still vaguely resembles a blog - while Pinterest is most definitely a photo sharing/inspiration site. They definitely do compete though - lots of people use Tumblr like Pinterest, as a place to collect hundreds of images for inspiration, categories with tags. They also "ReBlog" like crazy (duplicate another users' posts quickly and easily,) which is identical to Pinterest's "RePin" feature. They might use the more traditional blogging features occasionally - but they could deal without them. I kind of fit into this category.

Pinterest knocks Tumblr out of the park when it comes to posting an image from somewhere else online - where most people find their content. They both have bookmarklets to share content, but Tumblr's is hidden away whereas you are prompted to use Pinterest's. Tumblr's bookmarklet is powerful - and can share much more than just images - but is kind of cumbersome, as in, to make sure I am posting the right image I always have to right-click get image url, then paste that in before typing in my tag. Pinterest's bookmarklet only picks out large images so I can just click the picture I want - and I can choose what category (essentially the same as a tag) to use from a dropdown menu. It definitely makes socially sharing an image much easier.

It kind of feels like Pinterest saw what people were using Tumblr for and decided to strip it down and do it better. Tumblr will take anything you throw at it - pictures, video, quotes, text, links, photosets - Pinterest will take pictures and kind of video. Tumblr encourages user-generated content, and lots of people use Tumblrs as their portfolios or personal photoblogs; Pinterest states that it is not all a self-promotion tool. Tumblr lets you change your theme completely - until your blog is so far removed from a Tumblr blog the only thing that gives it away is the top right follow button - whereas Pinterest has a nice default grid design (reminds me of the Tumblr Archive) that you can't change.

Currently I use both, but I'm late to the game with Pinterest, and mostly use Tumblr. This is partly comfort, partly that I do enjoy the traditional blogging features, and partly that all my friends use Tumblr and I have invested a lot of time into the 6140 posts on my Tumblr. I think there is space for these sites to coexist, but they are definitely competing on some levels. I don't have the space to compare some other aspects - how Pinterest drives wishlist/purchasing and how it is apparently just for girls, and how different each site's dashboard is - but they are definitely important.

Which do you prefer?

Tumblr Jumps to 15B Page Views a Month

In five years, Tumblr has gone from a relatively unknown micro-blogging platform to a giant of the social media world.

The site now garners 120 million unique users and 15 billion page views every month, Tumblr's founder and CEO David Karp said on Monday at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, according to a report from The Next Web. Four months ago, the company said it received 13 billion page views a month and had 30 million blogs.

To date, more than 560 million people have viewed content on Tumblr, Karp said. U.S. users make up most of the site's traffic, with 45 percent or 249 million visitors to its networks coming from America. Forty nine million visitors come from Brazil, while 34 million come from the United Kingdom.

Tumblr use has skyrocketed in the last year in the U.S. alone, from 6.9 million unique U.S. visitors in November 2010 to 15.9 million a year later, according to comScore. Moreover, the site's nearly 42 million microblogs are re-blogged an average of nine times, significantly expanding the site's reach across the Web.

The re-blog function, "is like the Twitter re-tweets," Karp told in an interview earlier this month. "Something goes up on my blog, you love it, you can rip it out, put it on your blog while giving me attribution."

When asked why Tumblr has exploded in the last year, Karp pointed to "the fact that we attracted this really extraordinary group of creators."

"You're not really limited to your friends network," he continued. "Not that a friends network is a bad thing, but [who] you follow on Tumblr are not the people you know in real life, necessarily. There are random people on the other side of the planet who are kind of like-minded and who are really interesting to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it's celebrities who are doing really cool stuff. Sometimes it's an indie band or an indie filmmaker who's just posting about their process in a way that's totally compelling."

Tumblr differs from its blogging counterparts in that it specializes not in the long-form posts that can be found on Blogger or WordPress, but in media-driven posts that often include a link to a song, a photograph, or a YouTube clip instead of lengthy commentary.

The company's success has not been without headaches, like lengthy outages, however. Karp told PCMag that Tumblr has spent the last six months making improvements to the site to avoid similar problems in 2012. The company also recently introduced Fan Mail, a private messaging system for Tumblr users.

"We've always taken this position that we want to be very different from all of these [other social media] platforms," he said. "And if not different then actually very complementary. One way to describe it is where traditionally blogging was hearing my editorial voice, Tumblr is much more looking through my eyes."