Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_leaves_posterous_in_the_dust.php#more

by malte • 16 years ago

94 63 16 years ago

pierrefar• 16 years ago

Another very important metric, probably more important than raw traffic is number of users and number of posts to each service. You can get more creative in number of posts per blog per month, recency data (e.g. X% of all users have blogged at least once in the past 90 days) and get an even better picture.

Without this kind of context, raw traffic is kinda meaningless. At least the quantcast numbers for both are directly measured and not "estimated".

samwillis• 16 years ago

The two metrics that the article is based on are the number of visitors to the services homepage. On Tumblr you login to the website to post content, Posterous on the other hand uses email and so doesn't get its members visiting all the time to post new content. I think this article is flawed.

pavs5• 16 years ago

tumblr also allows posting by email, not to mention large amount of desktop publishing software that can be used to publish posts on tumblr. I have never used the tumblr homepage to publish blog post and I know quite a few people who doesn't do it either.

zavulon• 16 years ago

I think a better metric would be total number of Tumblr and Posterous and Wordpress blogs in existence.. Anyone has that information?

heinel4• 16 years ago

They do not advertise that feature as much though, and by using email, wouldn't you miss out on at least some of their main social networking selling point?

A lot of what makes them popular can only be found on their site. You don't get any engineering vibe from them, they project a very sensitive image that appeals to the heart. By not visiting their site, you are not participating.

I think the posterous offering is not diluted by email posting, and it would at least appear to me to make more sense if more people on posterous use email posting.

jacobian• 16 years ago

I've got to admit to taking a certain guilty pleasure in these numbers after Posterous' last campaign to get switchers. They were pompous, arrogent, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition. I'm pleased to see that such nasty tactics (apparently) paid little dividends.

Mystalic• 16 years ago

Nobody is entitled to any market.

kordless• 16 years ago

Wow, that's harsh man. Back earlier in the year I switched to them for my blog for a site I run on the side. Long story, but in a fit of infrastructure floundering I misconfigured my DNS settings and ended up sending them ALL my traffic. Gary went above and beyond by 'fixing' the issue with some internal routing trickery, and then kindly letting me know what I did that next morning.

I felt pretty sheepish about it, but I never got the impression those guys were any of the things you say here. To each his own!

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

"Dying platforms" was the phrase they used, IIRC. Was in a bad taste, for sure.

weixiyen• 16 years ago

I was actually about to use Posterous, but the campaign brought my attention to Tumblr, which previously I thought was just a tumble-log, not a blog with complete features.

After checking out Tumblr, it was not clear to me that Posterous was the better product and there were some issues with DDOS attacks at the same time. Also I saw two other people I knew using Tumblr as well.

If Posterous really became the clear-cut best blogging platform someday, I could always switch over with the switch tool, so the decision to use Tumblr for now was an easy one.

pavs5• 16 years ago

I swear, this might be hard to believe for some, this is EXACTLY the reason I tried out tumblr and ended up having a permanent blog there. It gave me the impression that tumblr was doing something right for posterous to try to "snag" their users.

I heard about tumblr all these years but never tried it before. Its funny how things work.

Jd• 16 years ago

I found out that Posterous could not successfully import my Tumblr blog posts despite several attempts, which wasted a good bit of my time and made me inclined never to try the service again.

fady• 16 years ago

Leave Posterous in the dust?...please.

Posterous is still superior in my opinion, regardless of users or traffic. It's the simplest, most intuitive platform I've used to date. Their source editor is sweet too. If I need to add some links, or change the entire template, I can, very easily... seems like it's user and hacker focused. No clutter, and they give complete control.

I'm not saying Tumblr does not have these traits, frankly, last time I used Tumblr was years ago, but no reason to write an article that assumes there is some kind of "finish line."

"pompous, arrogant, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition" Come on dude! Are they supposed to do it any different? Their "Import/Switch to" campaign was very creative, aggressive, and got a lot of new sign ups. I took notes, instead of complain...

bbgm• 16 years ago

Yes they are supposed to do it differently, at least if they wanted to keep me as a customer. While I use Posterous just for pushing to multiple destiantions (which it does brilliantly), I moved the primary site I was using Posterous for back to Tumblr specifically because of that campaign.

As s product manager, I've worked on switching campaigns before, but the manner in which Posterous chose to do so made me lose all faith in whether they cared about their customers or was it win at all cost.

ziadbc• 16 years ago

These two services have similarities, but someone could just have well written an article that says "Wordpress leaves Tumblr and Posterous in the dust."

I like the idea of a YC company taking on an existing one head on once in awhile, rather than looking for an overtly specific niche. Posterous still has a ton of users, and I think at one point and time the digg vs reddit chart looked pretty similar. Look at it today and you will see a different story.

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

Digg let down themselves. I doubt Tumblr is going to do. If nothing else, they have a decent design taste. That alone is enough to survive and multiply.

andreyf2• 16 years ago

They do have good design taste, but their technical side is missing quite a bit. Just earlier today, I couldn't figure out how to submit an image by URL (since they automatically resized my original): kept getting some kind of "invalid file" error (I'm not uploading a file!). Scheduled-publication was also broken the 1 time I tried it. Very frustrating.

lhnz• 16 years ago

I couldn't even get the import from tumblr feature to work on posterous...

pavs5• 16 years ago

No one in his right mind, outside the HN hivemind, things posterous is a serious challenge to tumblr.

listic2• 16 years ago

I have no idea what anyone thinks about matters like those outside the HN hivemind. How do you?

I started using Tumblr to jot down my notes because it looked cool and simple. To my regret, a couple times I found new "social" features on my dashboard, but that's it. I was actually afraid that this hobby project will fade away and shut down, unneeded. I was surprised to find it is not so!

andreyf2• 16 years ago

Thought this too, until I moved in with two professional (that is, paid) bloggers in NYC. Apparently, there's quite an ecosystem of tumblr "publishers" who care deeply about their tumblr follower numbers, etc.

j_baker• 16 years ago

I think the fact that this got 38 upvotes proves that you overestimate HN's hivemindedness.

antidaily• 16 years ago

I like tumblr - I like that I can point a domain there and essentially get free hosting. Problem is, the system is frequently down. And the way posts are queued to be published is just goofy.

zalew3• 16 years ago

Tumblr is easy to love as it seems less obliging from the start. It's dashboard is a prime example of KISS, and it's easy to use most of the features as well as not use them at all. I came to Posterous for it's 'autopost' feature which works really fine and I've used it for some time.

Both apps are great, Posterous webservices integration beats Tumblr, but the latter wins in terms of 'hanging around' browsing stuff from the community and that's probably the key point of their success in stats.

zecg• 16 years ago

"Celebrities and big media sites" listed as key to tumblr's recent explosion? No, the secret is the service allowing a HUGE forest of porn compilation sites such as http://art-or-porn.tumblr.com/ and many like it.

telemachos• 16 years ago

What exactly do you mean by "the secret is the service allowing a HUGE forest of porn compilation sites"? That is, does Tumblr actively do something to help porn compilation sites use their service, or do they simply not ban them?

Also, since I often see this mentioned as a difference, does Posterous do something to block porn (however strictly)?

I suppose my real question is "Sure, Tumblr has a lock on the porn market right now, but why?"

heinel4• 16 years ago

http://www.tumblr.com/directory/erotica (NSFW, FYI)

I guess you could argue erotica isn't porn, but yes, they like it. The notion actually extends beyond sexually explicit material, as many popular tumblelogs in the directory has porn or something that alludes to porn in their title even though they have nothing to do with sex.

c1sc0• 16 years ago

In my world 80% of those links don't qualify as porn. It's fairly classy stuff so I don't see how I should take it against Tumblr. What I do wonder about is how Tumblr makes money serving up so much content for free.

maxklein3• 16 years ago

The problem with Posterous is that the changes they have made over the past 8 months (since I started using it) have been small and irrelevant things (like code highlighting or such stuff).

When I write, I want to be appreciated and I want my writing to reach a big audience. Tumblr achieves that, posterous never made any change in that direction.

Posterous started off cool and fresh, but that initial slew of innovation has not been followed up on. Things like the backtype widget, view count, etc all were there from the start, and later not much new stuff came after that.

Posterous have focused too much on these technical stuff (like CSS buttons), and too little on the social stuff. I write for people to read, not for my page to look good.

Don't get me wrong, I like posterous a lot. But I just think posterous is simple by being limiting.

listic2• 16 years ago

On the other hand, I hate social stuff. I write notes in Tumblr for myself, because it looks simple. Occasionally show them to my friends when I want to. I don't want to follow ar be followed by anyone. I don't write in Posterous... why, really?

But I guess, I'm irreleveant.

rantfoil• 16 years ago

We're definitely working on it. =) But this feedback is super helpful. Thanks Max.

maxklein3• 16 years ago

See reply below to Matt for more details of what I meant.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

What "social stuff" do you find missing out of curiosity?

maxklein3• 16 years ago

I want a proper count of how my story is spreading in social networks (or graphs). I would like facebook + twitter commenting. I would like it to spread among smaller or alternative social networks. I'd like it to be possible for people to be notified even if they are not in the posterous network. I'd like integration with other commenting systems. I'd like "likes" or something equivalent. I'd like posterous "retweets" or such within the posterous network.

I don't mean social as in posterous creating their own social network, that would be silly. I just want tighter and deeper integration with social collections, such that what I write can spread wider and be more appreciated.

Being able to embed and image in a post is not a feature I really appreciate much, since I know html and thus can solve it very quickly. But integrating deeply with other social networks is not something I'm familiar with, and having such features would be great for me.

nhebb• 16 years ago

I don't post to either, but Tumblr makes it 100x easier to explore content on the site. Posterous doesn't even try - they bury the "Explore" link on the bottom of the home page and clicking that just gets the visitor a list of random and unorganized posts.

zalew3• 16 years ago

Exactly. Also, tumblr is full of NSFW blogs and that's a huge boost in visits.

Legion• 16 years ago

That point is exactly the first thing I thought of when I read the article. How much of Tumblr's traffic is for "photo blogs" of naked girls? Based on what I've observed, probably a good amount.

Not that that traffic is somehow invalid, but I think it makes the comparison a bit more apples-to-oranges.

jsvaughan• 16 years ago

No idea about posterous but there are lots of robot created profiles on tumblr (presumably for SEO purposes)

webwright• 16 years ago

There's a timeshifting problem at work here. If Tumblr was indeed first to market, then it SHOULD be ahead. They are similar products with similar (viral) growth styles. A more interesting questions would be this: Is Posterous growing as fast as Tumblr when Tumblr was at this stage/age.

Similar articles were written about Facebook and Twitter and now Twitter is getting 370k new accounts per day. It just takes time.

Personally, I find the social network features of Tumblr really jumbled and confusing as an outsider. LiveJournal was a social network, too, and it plateaued.

Tyrannosaurs• 16 years ago

Posterous was a year later than Tumblr but first to market doesn't count for as much as some people make out.

For social sites (Twitter, Facebook etc.) it's important because of the network effects but to read and interact with a blog on a particular site you don't need to have a blog on that site yourself (else we'd all still have LiveJournals). That means age or growth doesn't mean too much.

Of course that counts for Tumblr too which means that you've got to look at more standard factors for growth - functionality, cost, brand awareness and so on - and in these areas Tumblr seems to have an advantage which I suspect is why it's growing faster.

points• 16 years ago

How do either of them make money?

Eyeballs are good, but revenue is better.

kwamenum86• 16 years ago

Is it me or is that not exponential growth?

borism• 16 years ago

nope, just wanted to point out the same, and there's second comment about it too

wlfsbrg• 16 years ago

One of my biggest issues with Tumblr is the way they handle analytics. If you don't spend a couple minutes ahead of time setting up filters, you end up seeing all your own visits to a ton of admin pages like edit, themes, new and a few others. They make it pretty hard to accurately track your metrics.

nroach• 16 years ago

Of course, with Posterous, you can't track your metrics at all, unless you use Google Analytics. Any JS embedding, including tracking snippets are not supported.

jacobbijani2• 16 years ago

You can exclude yourself from Google Analytics directly.

http://www.google.com/search?q=exclude+yourself+from+google+...

mjv• 16 years ago

I evaluated both of these platforms without really thinking that either were competing with each other (although, I guess it's obvious). I found that, yes, Tumblr is huge, more user friendly and community driven, but it's also over-run with 13 year olds posting Twilight pictures, whereas Posterous just felt a little more focused on the single user blogging experience. A lot less clique-influenced. I liked that. It's disheartening to know they're going for the same things Tumblr is.

robryan• 16 years ago

That is something I've found, it is possible that the posterous user base can be more easily monetised than the tumblr mainly because on average they actually have money too spend. They both seem to lack a real revenue model currently.

mseebach• 16 years ago

> However for all of Posterous' hard work and bluster, it's been Tumblr that has grown exponentially over the past year.

For very linear implementations of exp()

cemerick• 16 years ago

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com+posterous.com+wo...

ahem

I know people get worked up about new stuff, but that doesn't mean the new stuff is better than the old (often far more reliable, featureful, etc. etc). I went with wordpress.com a couple months ago, and have loved it (with email posting and excellent code highlighting, even for Clojure :-P).

city41• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm completely wrong but to me it always felt like Tumblr landed on a seriously awesome name. There's just something nice about it: simple, clean, clever, cute, and very contemporary. It just feels nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Tumblr's name played a small factor in getting people to come check it out.

Sadly I think posterous's name is quite bad. It sounds like a developer came up with it (no offense guys), it doesn't roll off the tongue and it sounds intimidating.

These are just my hunches, no data at all to back any of this up, but I do feel like the right name can make a difference.

jonpaul• 16 years ago

I wish Tumblr would start charging for something. These services that are completely free worry me in the long run. I've put my heart and soul into writing almost every weekday on my blog. I would be devastated if they ever shut down. I would gladly pay to use it.

jacobbijani2• 16 years ago

We offer paid themes and directory promo spots.

Treat yourself to a pretty theme:

    http://www.tumblr.com/themes/premium

You'll also be supporting the theme designer in the process.

ludwigvan• 16 years ago

One word: Beauty.

I prefer and use Posterous; but somehow Tumblr seems to be much more beautiful; more Apple-ish. Posterous sites seems more serious.

Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

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