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Tell me the history of Tumblr -- areas of interest include growth #'s over time (users, Tumblrs created or whatever metric they highlight), successive funding, articles about the company, number of employees pre Yahoo! purchase, key employees, etc.
Hi there, and thanks for asking Wonder! I understand you'd like a deep dive history of Tumblr. The most useful sources I found to answer your question were business information providers Owler, Crunchbase, and Bloomberg; and articles on Tumblr by Wired and the Daily Dot. In short, Tumblr received $125M across 5 funding rounds between 2007 and 2011. The platform saw meteoric growth between 2009 and 2012, and had approximately 60 employees prior to the Yahoo acquisition. Below you'll find a deep dive of my findings.
ORIGINS
Tumblr was originally founded in response to co-founder David Karp's frustration with traditional blogging and media sharing sites: "I'm not a writer. I can't write. I don't enjoy it like [prolific bloggers] John Gruber or Jason Calacanis do. But I do have things to share." Inspired by tumblelogs Projectionist and anarchaia, Karp and his IT consultancy colleague Marco Arment built the original beta version of Tumblr during a two-week lull between website design contracts. Within two weeks of its official launch in early 2007, the platform had "75,000 user-created blogs."
FUNDING
In its initial year, Tumblr cost about $5,000 per month to run. Karp and Arment began looking for angel investors or venture funding opportunities; they sold 25% of the company in October 2007 to Tumblr's Series A investors. From 2007 to 2011, Tumblr received $125.5M in venture funding through 5 rounds of funding. The company also received an undisclosed amount of funding in 2012.
Tumblr's funding history is as follows:
> Oct 2007: Series A, $750,000 | 5 Investors: Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, Fred Seibert, and Albert Wenger
> Sept 2011: Series E, $85M | 7 Investors: Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Crunchfund, DFJ Growth, Greylock Partners, The Chernin Group
GROWTH METRICS
Although Tumblr showed extremely rapid growth from 2009 to 2012, multiple sources agree that the platform appears to have begun stagnating around the time of the Yahoo acquisition, perhaps slightly before. My research did not discover a precompiled source of statistics relative to global use or growth of Tumblr for its entire history. Its post-Yahoo! growth is attributed largely to increase in mobile use. However, I did glean the follow data from various media articles:
PRE-ACQUISITION
- From May 2010 to Oct 2010, monthly page views exploded from 400K to over 1B. The October number represented a 1,540% increased from the previous year. Total unique visitors tripled from Oct 2009 to Oct 2010, from a little more than 2M to 6M.
POST-ACQUISITION
REVENUE CHALLENGES
While Karp floated some ideas for revenue generation in a 2012 article with Wired, including "blog promotion and an App Store-like marketplace," he simultaneously admitted that he wasn't particularly concerned about revenue. Colleagues described Karp as "a coder at heart [who is] openly hostile to traditional advertising." At the time of the Yahoo! acquisition, Tumblr had blown through the vast majority of its venture funding and had no clear monetization strategy in place. At the time of the 2016 Verizon acquisition of Yahoo!, articles about Tumblr's potential future were still referring to it as a potential financial liability, echoing Yahoo!'s write-down of Tumblr in 2016.
KEY EXECUTIVES
- President: John Maloney
- Community Director: Marc LaFontain
- Creative Director: Jacob Bijani
- Director of Sysops: Marc Goldberg
EMPLOYEE COUNT
In 2010, when Tumblr received its first double-digit funding round, the platform had approximately 14 employees. In 2012, that number had increased to around 60. To date, it has an estimated 226 employees.
MEDIA COVERAGE
All my research indicates that, prior to the Yahoo! acquisition, media coverage of Tumblr was quite positive, highlighting its unique community and its meteoric growth. Media coverage following the acquisition was quiet in the first year, but became significantly doubtful from 2014 on, including multiple articles noting that Yahoo!'s decline spelled potential doom for Tumblr, that Tumblr is proving hard to monetize, and that Yahoo!'s heavy-handedness 'derailed' Tumblr. Recent articles from 2016 echo this sentiment, although one article on Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo! notes that Tumblr still has great value for Verizon. The most recent media coverage highlights Tumblr's integration of Cabana video functionality.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up: Tumblr's exponential growth of 2009-2011 has certainly slowed, but the platform continues to grow, though monetization continues to be a challenge. Co-founder David Karp has remained the CEO through two big-name acquisitions. Thanks so much for asking Wonder, and please let us know if there is anything else we can research for you!