A microblogging website founded in 2007 by David Karp. Noted for its ease of use, people can create short entries and post them in a matter of minutes. Four years after its inception, Tumblr eclipsed the well-known WordPress blogging site in number of users, and by 2013, more than 100 million Tumblr microblogs were hosted. The name comes from "tumblelog," which was a new term coined in the mid-2000s for a short-form blog.
Yahoo! -> Verizon -> Automattic
In 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo!, which was acquired by Verizon in 2017, and Tumblr was made part of the Verizon Media Group. In 2019, WordPress.com owner Automattic acquired Tumblr (see
WordPress).
Between X/Twitter and WordPress
Tumblr's huge popularity is due to how it fits into the blogging world. Entries can be much longer than X/Twitter posts, which are confined to 280 characters, but they tend to be smaller than standard blog entries that are often articles about a subject. A Tumblr entry can also be nothing more than a single image. See
microblog,
Twitter and
WordPress.