Does News Come To You, Or Do You Go Find It?

Are you a Tumblr?

According to Fortune, Tumblr has gone from 2 billion pageviews a month to over 13 billion and from 1 billion total posts to more than 10 billion in the past year. In September, Tumblr also announced an $85 million dollar round of financing.

So someone’s a Tumblr.

Mark Coatney is Media Evangelist for the company and he helps explain why the site is a success.

News has become this thing that comes to you. What we’re hoping to do is make Tumblr a delivery system for news that is unconscious almost. Where, if you follow the right people, you won’t have to remember to go to their site because their Tumblr blog will put that great piece you wanted to read right in front of you.

…From the beginning, Tumblr was built around the dashboard. When Tumblr was founded, there was more of a thought that it was a blogging platform. But as people started to use the dashboard, they started to realize that it was built from the ground up to share stuff. The dashboard is the sharing venue. If you look in your Tumblr dashboard the primary thing is your feed of stuff and it’s rendered beautifully and it’s not just lines of text and links — it really is the thing. Tumblr’s dashboard, more so than other places, is the venue where you consume the information as opposed to seeing “go here to read this.” This makes it a very good place to actually watch and participate.

So, it’s like an RSS reader, but more visually pleasing.

The other key insight that’s not discussed above is the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet, that lets users share an image, video or selection of text on their Tumblr page with just a couple clicks of the mouse. That’s a much more automated and rapid-fire form of blogging that we practice here. It’s also much better suited to widespread adoption than the old school model.