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.

There is always a lot of noise about Black Thursday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the ongoing battle between online and retail store sales. But how big of a difference does this make to the broadband networks used to do the shopping? Much less than you might think….

A GigaOM post details how Amazon is the leader for Black Friday, with almost double the number of users as eBay. A report from  CNN claims that practically “all” adults went shopping over the weekend (anyone over 14) either online or at retail outlets. Various reports show that smartphones were used more than tablets, and an IBM report shows that the iPad was the greatest generator of tablet sales by a long shot.

A look at some of our customer sites shows that the volume of traffic to some of the popular websites definitely was higher than normal, as much as 50% higher in terms of volume. From a bandwidth perspective, the traffic was insignificant, totally less than 1% of overall traffic.

This is a look at the first part of the shopping frenzy from Tuesday to Thanksgiving Day from different sites in the US:

Market 2

As you can see, Amazon is the clear leader in both cases, however Best Buy did not do badly either. eBay and Walmart were also successful in generating traffic. Remember that most of this traffic volume is driven by product images, so sites that had more images and larger ones would benefit in this evaluation by using more bandwidth as a result. Product videos are even better!

Then Black Friday through Cyber Monday hit:

Market 2

As you can see, the volume of traffic in both cases went up significantly on Black Friday (nearly doubled), even though it was still a very small overall percentage. The interesting spike for the second market during the middle of the day for Best Buy indicated a specific deal must have attracted interest. Drilling into that specific case:

The deal hit from 12:30 until a little past 3:00 in the afternoon. You can also see that traffic for all of the sites built over time during the day.

Taking a look at one of the sites across the week before and this week, you can see a building over time as the shopping urge hit consumers.

So, did the shopping craze impact networks? Yes, but not as much from a traffic perspective as much as a continuing reminder of the importance of good, fast broadband. I personally saw several instances as I was shopping on Amazon looking for their Instant Deals, where some deals literally came active and disappeared in a matter of seconds. If you had slow or high latency broadband, you might have missed out on some great deals – and Santa wouldn’t like that!

Good luck shopping for the rest of the holiday season.