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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can only speak for myself. I personally user tumblr (only started few months ago) for private ramblings about random stuff that comes in my mind. My tumblr is blocked from search engine and I have not shared the link with anyone. I also blocked out comments and whatever other social media features there might be. I would have made it password protected if they allowed private tumblers to have access to API (you can't post to password protected pages from desktop publishing software AFAIK).
I know this is not how or why most people use tumblr. But thats ok. I use it only the way I like it.
I also have a "public" self hosted wordpress blog which I share with my friends and family and open to search engine.
posterous, to me, is just yet another blogging platform. Just like I don't feel like I need to try out every single new things comes out every week, I don't feel like posterous really sets them apart is such a way from all other existing blogging platform for me to even bother.
Of course Posterous is just another blogging platform. Have they tried to be anything else? The way you described how you use tumblr does seem to suggest that Posterous is actually a better fit, but it appears that you just found tumblr first and didn't bother to switch.
The Posterous switch campaign awhile back was targeted at users like you. That's how they were trying to set themselves apart. It might not have worked well, but the intention is clear.
There is only so much a utility product can do to diversify itself from competitors. A condom is a condom is a condom. As long as it doesn't leak, it works. Would you complain that Trojan's products are not sufficiently different from Durex?
If I were to take your analogy seriously than it would right to argue that all operating systems are just OS, it makes no difference whether you use windows, OSX, Linux, BSD, solaris.
The reason yor analogy doesn't work is because condoms are single purpose, blogging software and OS are not. They can be and has been able to set them apart from one another with features, implementations, ease of use and services.
This ignores quality, convenience, and the user experience. Not all condoms are the same, and how they are deployed by the user makes all the difference in the world.
Actually a better but probably a lot harder to get metric would be active blogs as I know I have created an account on all the sites to see how they work.
And don't throw blogger out if you are adding big blogs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not exactly apples to oranges, because that doesn't make the community argument invalid. It's the fun of exploring content on Tumblr that made it possible to grow a network of erotic photoblogs (and not only erotic, check all the 'f*yeahsomething' categories, all kind of lols and such). I didn't bother to check if Posterous' TOS somehow block such content, but still if it was there, currently it's not so easy to find and follow as on Tumblr.
Not exactly apple to orange, but more Facebook to LinkedIn?
A social network's content is its people. I think Tumblr did well targeting the casual crowd. Posterous blogs that I come across, on the other hand, are very "merit-arian," so to speak. Lots of industry focused minds on there that is famous not because of Posterous, but because they are also high in some other circle. In this case, Posterous is only providing them with the tools, with a small Posterous ad attached.
I wouldn't want to see them sacrificing that just to beat Tumblr.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?"
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.
porn has always been a great early indicator on the web, and the fact that blogger porn sites have exploded on Tumblr indicates that is usability, and social features are superior.
I'm a big fan of Posterous but the social edge on Tumblr means more traffic and exposure for the blog which what attracts and keeps people on the platform.
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.
