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Tumblr Is Tumbling (medium.com)
Alex Barredo, a technology writer, shares his observation on Tumblr's popularity over the past few years: Tumblr is the home of some of the most creative online personas, and now it is dying. Or so it seems. Founded on early 2007 by David Karp with a new formula for really simplified blogging, it quickly took off. With each passing quarter, most of their stats were crushing it. It was the new star of the New York tech scene. The East Coast had a good social platform after years of Californian monopoly (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc), at last. In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion: $990 million plus liabilities. Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35 million. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said today he was leaving the company. Karp founded Tumblr close to 11 years ago with Marco Arment. He wrote: I beg you to understand that my decision comes after months of reflection on my personal ambitions, and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future or the impact I know it can have. The internet is at a crossroads of which this team can play a fundamental role in shaping. You are in the driver seat, and I am so excited to see where you go!
Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.
Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out.
Tumblr being bought by Yahoo was the first major step to that status.
All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (like Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes). That has not happened yet.