“Tumblr” has surpassed “blog” as one of the most searched terms on
Google.
Tumblr overtook blog in December for the first time since the
microblog network was started in February 2007, tweeted Laura Olin,
Outbound social media director.
The decline of the traditional blog was foreshadowed in June 2009 by
The Guardian's Charles Arthur in a story aptly titled "
The Long Tail of Blogging is Dying."
"Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting," Arthur
wrote.
"People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the
creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I
think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long
tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude."
In November 2012, Tumblr became one of the
top 10 most visited sites in the world, with an audience of about 170 million people per month, according to statistics from
Quantcast. The network also collects about
20 billion pageviews per month, Tumblr founder David Karp announced.
“This isn’t meant to be a brag – though you should definitely try our
new Android and iOS apps if you haven’t yet – but a credit to all of
your brilliant creative efforts,” Karp wrote in a
blog post.
"You guys have earned an audience bigger than the biggest TV networks,
and you continue to make some of the most thought provoking, insightful,
inspiring, funny, diverse, and compelling content being created today.”
The word blog was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999. Thanks to early
blogging networks like LiveJournal and Blogger, blogs became known for
their "raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality," the
Economist reported in 2006. The sudden rise of blogging may have also been its downfall, the
New York Times reported in June 2009.
"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine
for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company
tracks had been updated in the past 120 days,'" The
Times added.
"That translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to
lie fallow on the web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or
at least an ambition — unfulfilled."
Thanks to streamlined blogging networks like Wordpress, which powers about
22% of websites in the U.S., the traditional blogging model is certainly not going anywhere fast. But with Tumblr powering
87 million blogs, and growing, Wordpress' days of dominance may be numbered.
Image courtesy of Flickr, jessaax
