Tumblr Doesn't Leave Posterous in the Dust | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr Doesn't Leave Posterous in the Dust

tonywright.com

60 pointswebwright17 comments

Either I’m not getting it or he didn’t change the graph correctly. The light blue line are tumblr’s US visitors (green are tumblr’s global visitors). Why did he shift that line? And why only tumblr’s US numbers, not global?

The two dark blue lines are Posterous’s visitors (again, US and global) and they are always less than tumblr’s, all the time. Shifting doesn’t seem to change anything.

Here is the graph with labels: http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...

You are correct. The author did not correctly read the graphs. The time shift was done on tumblr's US numbers vs. The global numbers. The posterous data was ignored at the bottom.

look at y axis and now look at Posterous numbers.

Yikes-- I misread the graph. The post is adjusted. Sincere apologies to folks for the incorrect analysis on my part.

The point stands though. This is a race without a finish line. With two runners circling the track, it's more about who cramps up when. Tumblr was at ~7m uniques per month at the stage that Posterous is currently at (~2.5m uniques). Certainly ahead, but not quite the blowout the RWW is reporting.

actually if your point was "Tumblr Doesn't Leave Posterous in the Dust " the misread does kind of kill your whole post.

Having a competitor be 4 million uniques ahead of you when you're 2 years into a consumer internet race? I dunno. Wordpress.com, by comparison, has about 160m uniques per month (per quantcast). Tumblr and Posterous are still in "small potatoes" country-- it's anybody's game.

4M vs 400K is a pretty wide margin. You also tried to compare growth rates which didn't exist. Finally you're also are showing a graph with Tumblr's growth climbing and postereous's growth pretty flat. If anything you just reinforced the point that Tumblr is leaving postereous in the dust.

There are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Daily pageviews here is probably the least useful metric to evaluate our site, given that Posterous doesn't chase pageviews and send daily subscription emails (full text bodies) to users directly. Users can also reply to comments via email without ever going back to the site. The monthly numbers are much more in line and reflect the way our users use the site.

More on that first-mover advantage...

The author suggests that it is not a factor in this arena as Tumblr will inevitably plateau due to a lack of new user signups. I disagree. So long as there are new users signing up for these services they will most likely lean toward Tumblr as the larger community is enough reason for them to go that route. I believe it will be Posterous who plateaus as a result of this.

As it stands, Posterous should be content in stealing Tumblr's users. And boy have they capitalized on this. Posterous allows you to import your old content from over 15 services (including Tumblr).

Facebook has shown us that there are over 500 million potential "new users." I'm not sure it's safe to say that Tumblr new user signups will plateau as a result of a lack of people showing interest in microblogging.

"So long as there are new users signing up for these services they will most likely lean toward Tumblr as the larger community is enough reason for them to go that route."

Geocities and LiveJournal are two sites that had pretty meteoric growth at some point. Plenty of social networks (Orkut, MySpace) looked pretty shiny at one point, too. Every company slows down-- otherwise upstart startups wouldn't be able to beat incumbents.

Very true, but the examples you cited also involved long-time users abandoning those services. The author was careful to note a plateau, not a downward spiral.

Would I argue against Tumblr eventually hitting a downward spiral (negative growth)? Certainly not. I think that is more likely to happen before it sees no growth (positive or negative).

Additional edit: Mind you, I have no statistical evidence to support these claims. These are purely some thoughts that I have, and, quite frankly, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

yup you are right. the only reason Posterous could gain so much users so fast is because of Tumblr and microblogging becoming popular.

Label your graphs.

Ironically, the lack of substance in this article make it seems this it like a "linkbait" rather than the original article the author calls linkbait

Point: Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

Counterpoint: It’s not just about growth rate. It’s about acceleration and how much fuel you have in your tank.

Are you guys debating business or desert road racing?

Exactly when did we replace discussions of compelling business propositions, market share, revenue, capitalization, and profitability with metaphors? Both points of view could use a little more meat on their bones for the rest of us to see past the cat fight and understand the real business issues at hand.

great graph overlay/transpose -- i've found posterous to be much faster in my infrequent use of both tumblr and posterous -- also, i'm not a fan of the commenting mechanism (reblogging) from tumblr -- for folks who use it often, they love it, but i find it to be really nonintuitive. makes me think that the early adopter's love it, but to go mainstream they'll need to shift it, which will turn off the early folks. posterous, by comparison, just does things fast/elegant, which seems more broadly appealing. time will tell.

Yeah, I find reblogging and some of the other mechanisms in Tumblr to be kinda jumbled and confusing. On pure merit, I tend to lean towards Posterous... If I were more of an early stage investor, I think I'd want stock in BOTH. :-)

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