Yahoo (formally) announced that they intend to purchase Tumblr. Why would they spend that much money for a site that is at its heart a photo sharing site?

Tumblr is now a major force in generating broadband traffic on the Internet. The snapshots below reflect the amazing growth in traffic to Tumblr. A brief look from one North American Fixed Line ISP reflects the massive growth in popularity of Tumblr, even eclipsing facebook.com in total traffic (even if fbcdn.net is added, Tumblr still wins by a huge margin). The first number represents the amount of traffic daily to the site, and the second is the number of connections daily.

December 2011

May 2013

As you can see, Tumblr has experienced massive growth, with a five-fold increase in traffic over the time period . Tumblr’s own stats show that they have over 108M blogs on the site, with many of the blogs very active with a huge amount of daily views (again, views up almost 5x as well). From a traffic point of view, Tumblr ranks second overall on this ISP, with only YouTube generating more traffic daily, as shown below.

This trend is consistent on both Fixed and Mobile deployments that we see this pattern across our deployment footprint. Interestingly enough, most operators don’t complain about this as much as they do video traffic, and here is why:

As you can see, the amount of video traffic is about 76 times more than the total amount of traffic from Tumblr (although Tumblr is actually generating some of this traffic as they embed YouTube and other videos on the blogs). Now Yahoo just has to figure out how to monetize the site, as Google has proven can be done with advertising as well as the new pay channels for YouTube.

Good luck to Yahoo in their quest to get eyeballs, and we will keep an eye on if this acquisition negatively affects the traffic to Tumblr.