WordPress founder claims 72,000 posts defected from Tumblr | Hacker News Reader

WordPress founder claims 72,000 posts defected from Tumblr

engadget.com

38 pointsSonicSoul11 comments

I believe 72K POSTS were transitioned to Wordpress, not 72K individual blogs. [1]

Replicating posts to a different platform does not mean users are defecting. Many are just planning ahead in case of any issues.

[1] http://ma.tt/2013/05/yahooblr/

"Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000."

He posted a rate of posts (as you mentioned), rounded down, for the "last hour".

When I read stuff like this that covers fields that I know (or blog posts I happen to have read) it really makes me wonder when I'm reading sites covering topics outside of by domain of knowledge, be they Engadget or the Economist.

Numbers are relevant when there is context to properly digest those numbers. Here's some comparison from the flipside from Yahoo's press release:

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month.

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?&Re...

120,000 new accounts every day is amazing. While I don't know how many accounts made up those 72,000 posts over that hour, I can imagine it being easily and quickly wiped out by new posts. 900 posts per second is 3.24 million posts per hour. 72,000 is 2.22%. If that number keeps growing and the 900 posts per second number drops, then this is interesting news. Until then, it's just posturing by WordPress (or perhaps just a cheap publicity stunt).

> 120,000 new accounts every day is amazing.

Again, context is needed. The exact word they used was "signup." Are they referring to new users, or new blogs created by the same users? I recall someone saying that one of the upsides of Tumblr is how easy it is to just create a new blog when you have a random idea for one.

Also, 900 posts/second isn't hard to achieve if most users are using the site to post a pic or a short message.

Its even less amazing when the posts are copies of existing content. Tumblr is more like instant messaging or social networking than blogging.

And yes, a big question is how many of those new accounts are new users verse existing users and spam.

72k posts could be just a handful of active accounts. My own has 15k or so posts and I often don't touch it for weeks at a time.

If the comments below are true, this is a very poorly written, badly researched article. If you can even call it an article. It looks like they spent more time putting together a witty movie poster-style graphic than they did actually creating the content.

In the original post's comments, Matt says:

"FWIW, I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups."

There is nowhere near enough information to make a judgement here. I doubt Marissa Mayer will be answering any awkward questions about this today, or anytime in the near future.

Matt Mullenweg is not "WordPress" CEO.

Yeah, according to http://automattic.com/about/ Matt is Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic and Toni Schneider holds the title of CEO. Wikipedia lists Matt as founder and president.

Feels a bit nitpicky though.

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