19th
I talked to David Karp and he said some things about Tumblr
So, I interviewed Tumblr founder David Karp last week for a short biographical item that will appear in an upcoming issue of Paper. We talked for like an hour, about him for some of the time but also a lot about Tumblr and how it works. Since most of that stuff is not going to be used in the Paper thing I thought I’d post a few of the interesting bits here.
Re: unread counts and “inbox bankruptcy.”
We did the interview the day Google launched Buzz, and I mentioned that a friend and I had just gotten through bemoaning the fact that there was now an extra number all up in our faces reminding us how much stuff we haven’t read. Karp apparently hadn’t seen Buzz yet and was pretty surprised to hear from me that it came with an unread count. Unread counts cause mental blocks, he said, and they’re the reason everyone dumps their RSS readers after like two days of starting them. On the Tumblr dashboard, “you don’t get freaked out if you miss stuff. You never feel overwhelmed… Most active Tumblr users have missed things on their dashboards, but they don’t remember, they don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.”
Re: likes.
Liking a post, unlike reblogging it, does not spread that post to other users. I asked Karp whether having that option might actually harm Tumblr or make it less dynamic, because theoretically if everyone was forced to reblog the stuff they liked, that stuff would be seen by their followers, and then reblogged again forever and ever. Karp’s answer was that people like a lot more stuff than they’d reblog if liking was not an option, which is definitely right. More importantly, though, he said that in general people were very unlikely to appreciate their friends’ likes even if they reliably enjoyed the stuff those friends posted themselves. “Unless people are really selectively liking things or curating the things they like, it’s kind of all over the place, and the content doesn’t wind up being nearly as good for the people consuming it.”
He said also that he wants people to use likes as social gestures, rather than a way to archive stuff. He wants people to be really generous with likes—“more likes is good for social networks”—and when I told him I thought they didn’t mean as much now as they used to because people are so much more promiscuous with them, he was really happy to hear it.
Re: traffic.
“Half of our traffic now is generated from the dashboard. That’s unheard of for a publishing platform. Wordpress has nine times the audience that Tumblr has, but they only have two times the traffic.” The reason for this: “We have a community that uses the site rather than people who come across a Wordpress post every once in a while.”
Also: Tumblr has more users in San Francisco than anywhere else, followed by New York, then Los Angeles. Karp wasn’t totally sure about this but said he thought in New York, Brooklyn does more traffic than Manhattan.
Re: making money.
They are working on features they could charge for, such as letting users upload more than one audio file per day. He didn’t give a lot of examples, but one very interesting one involves charging people in exchange for promoting their posts. “The most sought after thing on Tumblr is more visibility— more attention, more notes, more likes on a particular post,” he said. The idea is that if someone writes a post they’re particularly proud of, or just something they want a lot of feedback on, they’ll be able to pay some small amount of money and then that post will be featured in a particular directory. At this point I’m not sure how much people look at the directories so I don’t know if this will be effective, but probably as Tumblr gets bigger those directories will become more useful.
I dunno if that any of that stuff is interesting or surprising but there it is.
