Audreleine Tanya Prof. Magno
303B – AB Literature and Literacy Expository Reading and Writing
2nd draft
Topic: Why David Karp made Tumblr and made it a better social site for its users
Thesis Statement: Tumblr takes on a farther step from other social and blogging sites as David Karp mixes traditional blogging with tumblelogging and multimedia to make posting blogs easier and appealing while maintaining a sense of identity and community on the users.
We have all heard about teenagers dropping out of school because of various reasons (pressure, anti-conformists, breakdowns, etc), but we were never really ready to see them, in the future, to become big-shots in companies, much less if they had been dreaming about them ever since. David Karp is one of those teens who dropped out of High School who seemed to be destined to become one of the most recognized young entrepreneurs on the World Wide Web business. Having read HTML for Dummies at the age of 11, his interest in software programming peaked; by the age of 15, he dropped out of the elite Bronx Science High School to pursue his first career full-time. With the blessing from his parents, he began his own software consulting company, Davidville, while resorted to homeschooling. While at work, he sometimes had to lie about his age, fearing that being a pubescent software consultant could make clients not take him seriously. Nevertheless, his mother Barbara Ackerman, a Science teacher in The Calhoun School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, commented that he “was like a little adult,” after she and her husband agreed to pursue his job (Shafrir, 2008).
His internship that started when he was fourteen under Fred Seibert, who runs an online animation company called the Frederator Studios and was his mentor, had also given David Karp an opportunity to go to Japan to work for UrbanBaby, a consulting site for urban parenting, as a chief technology officer (Shafrir, 2008; Welch, 2011). He was 17 when he had been in Tokyo for five months working under UrbanBaby. The staff did not mind that he was still a minor, which was a change from his previous time at Davidville where he feared his age would become a liaison to his job.
By the time David Karp turned 19, a new word had entered lexicons: “tumblelog”, a short-form of blogging and does not follow traditional formatting blogs. Fascinated by this new form of blogging, David Karp kept waiting for a blog platform that uses “tumblelog”. He decided upon himself, just a year later when no tumblelogging platform was still established, that he would make his own blog platform (Shafrir, 2008). Naming it Tumblr, he launched it on the 19th of February 2007 (More Intelligent Life).
The number of users increased from 170,000 from the earlier months after its launch, growing to billions with 20 new blog posts each minute, with 255 million pageviews in the year 2009 (Deleon, 2010) and had surpassed WordPress this January 2011 (Kessler, 2011). The ease of use of making an account, as it only asks for a new user an email and password, to posting tumblelog features: posting blogs with sentences with one word only; posting pictures, audio and video to add to the content of your blogs and even quoting other notable works gives the users’ the sense of personalizing their Tumblr accounts. Other notable features include ‘following’ other people so that the user can see their posts in the Tumblr dashboard; reblogging certain posts that one likes and sharing them in the process; the Like button—in the shape of a heart—that functions as a way of showing appreciation to a certain post. David Karp shares that it was from his work experiences from UrbanBaby that he learned how a social community works on the net and felt that it should be on Tumblr as well, who added multimedia features as a way for users to have a great affinity to these posts that they feel should be shared. It is also here on Tumblr that users give a sense of identity on their blogs, as they can redesign their templates, backgrounds, or even upload a design of their own from scratch, besides posting of favorites in a user’s account. “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks,” so says the Tumblr website (Shafrir, 2008). It even boasts multiple services where a user can still be online from other social networks, such as Facebook and WordPress, as the user posts on Tumblr.
For David Karp, the business of Tumblr is a dream come true. “This is what I like about my job,” said Mr. Karp when asked by The Observer. As for the business side of Tumblr, things have, so far looked well. Mr. Karp once sold a small part of his company for 25% in October 2008, to a group of investors from Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, among others, giving Mr. Karp and his company a value of $3 million (Shafrir, 2008). David Karp is not the typical CEO of a company either, as he had honestly said that he is very much ‘an anti-schedule person’, not wanting to have his creative flow be interrupted by an appointment. His meetings are also very unconventional; their meeting room is full of couches and sofas, not a big desk is in sight at all, and they would even have lunch together while they discussed their latest projects or issues in the website. His warm and laid-back relationship towards his employees—who he dubbed as all “autonomous” and are capable of hiring their own new member even without him—seems to have a great impact on how they deal the finances of the company and its programming business (Welch, 2011).
Running for the past four years, Tumblr has been growing in an increasing rate that it not only has surpassed WordPress in terms of the number of blog posts, but also its popularity amongst its users, mostly teenagers that have become rampant online(Ingram, 2011). It may seem that Facebook and Twitter are still the “top dogs” when it comes to a staggering number of 160,000 and 25,000+ unique visitors per month which is more than what the 5,000 is in Tumblr per second (Lipsman, 2011; Ingram, 2011), but with 8.4 billion pageviews per month and 355 million of actual visitors in total, according to Quantcast, it should be noted that this is a great achievement in an Internet company to have loyal users to have given Tumblr such a result. It had even made it to the Top 25 Websites in the World. As for Tumblr’s popularity amongst teens, which had a hand in the rise of the statistics of Tumblr when compared to social and blogging sites, its combination with the traditional blogging of WordPress, Blogger, etc. and its tumblelogging feature, as well as its Twitter-esque way for users to ‘follow’ others and the ease of posting media makes it more appealing and less complex. Also, journalists from the notable New York Times also switched from using traditional blogging platforms to use Tumblr to post news as well, resulting in staggering numbers from reblogging alone and thousands of comments (Ingram, 2011).
Despite the mounting fame of Tumblr, the CEO and his employees are still hard at work at maintaining its essence of community that David Karp learned from his previous career while improving it with new ideas and getting collaborative work from different fields. On an interview in More Intelligent Life, David Karp shares the reason that Tumblr is what it is today because it is focused more on what the people wanted to post as it shows more about themselves—their identity in the community—by sharing what they know, what they’ve created and what they love to the Tumblr community (“More Intelligent Life”, n.d.).
One of the new steps that Mr. Karp is working on is highlighting creative communities from fashion and film in Tumblr (O’ Dell, 2011). His concern to promote the users in Tumblr shows this. Recently hiring Richard Tong, who started a fashion site called Weardrobe, owned by Google, became the Fashion Editor for the fashion community on Tumblr, since 18% of the blogs are fashion related and Mr. Karp intends to reach for the demographic as well (Welch, 2011). David Karp also has great hopes that by the end of 2011 the company can have 70 or more new hired hands to increase the current staff so that it will be able to meet the demands of the future plans and projects of the company. The engineers in Tumblr are also hard on work as they further improve on how users can have a great experience on Tumblr, especially since it now has an application on the iPad and on other mobile apps (O’ Dell, 2011).
Tumblr still has a long way to meet the current status of Facebook and other very famous social networks, but it has already gone through such a radical change in a short space of time, all of which were from Mr. Karp’s aim for Tumblr on focusing “real content and real viewers instead of valuation” (Shafrir, 2008). His focus for the community on Tumblr had gained it much acclaim and, of course, the response of its users is evidence to that. For the future plans and developments of and for Tumblr, besides that Mr. Karp has revealed that the company would focus on promoting the different communities on Tumblr, there has not been news on that one lately. But according to Kit Eaton, he states that since Tumblr is being used as a means to share and promote content in simple posts and uses imagery for the appeal, the number of users that are advertising these brands will double while other traditional blogs will soon find ways of how Tumblr is promoting content by adding multimedia features and ease of connectivity to other social networks (2011) and perhaps Tumblr would soon become an advertising tool for these famous brands.
Tumblr takes on a farther step from other social and blogging sites as David Karp mixes traditional blogging with tumblelogging and multimedia to make posting blogs easier and appealing while maintaining a sense of identity and community on the users. However the future of Tumblr turns out, perhaps the concern should be focused on how the present should be handled, as David Karp already has expectations on reaching out to more communities, as how he had already envisioned Tumblr should be about: the community.
Works cited:
Deleon, N. (2010, July 19). Tumblr is on Fire. Now Over 6 Million Users, 1.5 Million Pageviews A Month. Tech Crunch. Retrieved July 19, 2011, from http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/tumblr-stats/
Eaton, K. (2011, June 16). What Tumblr’s Success Means To The Future Of Blogs. Fast Company. Retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.fastcompany.com/1760460/what-tumblrs-success-can-teach-us-about-blogs-twitters-future
Ingram, M. (2011, June 28). Is Tumblr The New Facebook or The New MySpace?. Gigaom.com. Retrieved July 24, 2011, from http://gigaom.com/2011/06/28/is-tumblr-the-new-facebook-or-the-new-myspace/
Kessler, S. (2011, June 15). Tumblr Now Has More Blogs Than Wordpress.com. Mashable.com. Retrieved July 20, 2011, from http://mashable.com/2011/06/15/tumblr-surpasses-wordpress/
O’ Dell, J. (2011, Jan. 15). Tumblr’s Roadmap Heads Straight For The Creative Community. Mashable.com, from http://mashable.com/2011/01/15/tumblrs-roadmap-heads-straight-for-the-creative-community/
Q&A: David Karp, Founder of Tumblr. More Intelligent Life. Retrieved July 22, 2011, from http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/molly-young/qa-david-karp-founder-tumblr
Shafrir, D.. (2008, Jan. 15). Would You Take a Tumblr With This Man?.
Observer.com. 1, 2 and 4. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from http://www.observer.com/2008/would-you-take-tumblr-man
Welch, L.. (2011, June). The Way I Work. Inc.com
1-3. Retrieved July 16, 2011, from http://www.inc.com/magazine/201106/the-way-i-work-david-karp-of-tumblr.html
