Bijan Sabet

My dual citizenship on Tumblr

The more I spend time on tumblr and pay attention to my own interactions, the more they are in sync with the data & metrics we see in the boardroom and on quantcast.

The vast majority of interaction and engagement happens in the Tumblr feed which is called the Tumblr Dashboard. This behavior started to develop early last year and then only accelerated.

Essentially, logged in users drive the vast majority of the usage & page views.

This month, Tumblr will have something like 11-12 billion page views per month in the Tumblr Dashboard. That’s about 3x as much traffic as the “blog network” gets on tumblr per month.

I talked about this about a year ago when I wrote that your Tumblr reach is bigger than you think. Essentially, more people read & engage with Tumblr content “logged in” than otherwise.

That’s so interesting to me because as a Tumblr user, I can design and create a beautiful & unique presence on the web. My tumblr looks very different than many of my friends presence on Tumblr.

And I think that’s what makes Tumblr so special.

We are dual citizens as Tumblr users. We participate on the Dashboard every day reading each others content and engaging with that by following, reblogging, loving and replying.

And we exist outside the Dashboard where we can also trick out our blogs, make them our own, create custom themes and add new pages.

Our Tumblr belongs to the users to create as much (or as little as you want) to.

I love that.