The Internet story of the year – perhaps of many years – began with a breezy, underpunctuated blog post on the Tumblr of some 21-year-old no one had previously heard of.
“Guys please help me,” the blogger wrote, ignorant of the fact that her words would echo in eternity. “Is this dress white and gold, or blue and black?”
“The dress,” of course, has since become a Web phenomenon of unparalleled virality: 73 million page views on the post itself within its first week, 550 tweets a minute at its peak, and a veritable Everest of takes and think pieces.
Buzzfeed, the outlet that first broke the story (insofar as it was a “story,” and swiping it from Tumblr counts as “breaking”), published 30 follow-ups within a week. They had, per the “viral guru” Neetzan Zimmerman, reached “Viral Singularity.”
But while the dress may have been singularly popular, the path it took to get there was increasingly commonplace. From the depths of Tumblr, it conquered the entire viral Web: Buzzfeed, Twitter, Facebook eventually.
“This seems to be the new Viral Cycle,” Zimmerman told Vice’s Adrianne Jeffries.
It’s impossible to conclusively quantify the meta trends of the viral Web, of course, even given the host of tools and consultants dedicated to that pursuit. But when Pricenomics’s data team scraped Buzzfeed to see where the viral powerhouse finds its stories, it found that Tumblr came out on top – over YouTube, Reddit and Imgur.
Translation? Tumblr might just be the new ground zero of the viral Internet.
“Tumblr is definitely spawning serious discussion,” said Aisling McMahon, who tracks viral Web content for the analytics site NewsWhip. “... I think its influence in the case of memes and viral images is starting to rival more established image-based sites” – image-based sites you may be more familiar with, such as Instagram and Reddit.
Tumblr is a bit of a standout in that space: It doesn’t belong to any one genre conclusively. The site began as a multimedia blogging platform – a place where users could share text, photos, songs and links. But because Tumblr is structured heavily around “following” other bloggers and sharing their work, it quickly evolved into a vast, unmapped network of niche communities.
That has made the site unattractive to some business analysts, who say it’s a little too artsy for marketers to make inroads. But Tumblr’s unusually young userbase was attractive to Yahoo, which shelled out almost $1 billion for Tumblr in June 2013.
Since then, the number of blogs on the network has more than doubled, from 105 million to 269.7 million. More than 63 million posts are made to the site each day, as of December 2015.
In the past week alone, Tumblr has brought us – drumroll, plz – the “All I Want for Christmas is You” MIDI and that highly disturbing rumor about bone-stealing.
“Based on our coverage of memes from Tumblr, it’s been one of the most consistently growing sources of memes out of all the major social media hubs,” ssid Brad Kim, the editor of Know Your Meme.
To be clear, Tumblr’s users – or “creators,” as the site tellingly likes to call them – are not doing anything different than what they’ve been doing for the past eight years. The site’s quixotic founder, David Karp, has idealized it as a platform for creativity since it launched in 2007. In 2012, when mainstream media began to pay attention, they repeatedly described it, in contrast to Twitter and Facebook, as the network where people “expressed themselves” publicly. Tumblr gave us “the 99 percent,” McKayla is Not Impressed, Texts from Hillary and Feminist Ryan Gosling.
“Tumblr is the pipeline to youth culture online,” said Ryan Broderick, a Buzzfeed reporter who frequently surfaces Tumblr memes. “I think the reason for that is that it’s kind of a tough site to navigate, no hashtags, etc. A lot of the teenagers and college students on there have a feeling of privacy.”
But critically, that privacy – or the perception of it – is changing. After years without a central hub on which users could view popular content, Tumblr launched its answer to Reddit’s front page and Twitter’s trending topics last December: a page called “Explore” where anyone – registered on the site or not – can see the Tumblr blogs, search terms and posts that are currently most popular.
