Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

I've got to admit to taking a certain guilty pleasure in these numbers after Posterous' last campaign to get switchers. They were pompous, arrogent, and unnecessarily slagged on their competition. I'm pleased to see that such nasty tactics (apparently) paid little dividends.

The problem with Posterous is that the changes they have made over the past 8 months (since I started using it) have been small and irrelevant things (like code highlighting or such stuff).<p>When I write, I want to be appreciated and I want my writing to reach a big audience. Tumblr achieves that, posterous never made any change in that direction.<p>Posterous started off cool and fresh, but that initial slew of innovation has not been followed up on. Things like the backtype widget, view count, etc all were there from the start, and later not much new stuff came after that.<p>Posterous have focused too much on these technical stuff (like CSS buttons), and too little on the social stuff. I write for people to read, not for my page to look good.<p>Don't get me wrong, I like posterous a lot. But I just think posterous is simple by being limiting.

No one in his right mind, outside the HN hivemind, things posterous is a serious challenge to tumblr.

The two metrics that the article is based on are the number of visitors to the services homepage. On Tumblr you login to the website to post content, Posterous on the other hand uses email and so doesn't get its members visiting all the time to post new content. I think this article is flawed.

These two services have similarities, but someone could just have well written an article that says "Wordpress leaves Tumblr and Posterous in the dust."<p>I like the idea of a YC company taking on an existing one head on once in awhile, rather than looking for an overtly specific niche. Posterous still has a ton of users, and I think at one point and time the digg vs reddit chart looked pretty similar. Look at it today and you will see a different story.

There's a timeshifting problem at work here. If Tumblr was indeed first to market, then it SHOULD be ahead. They are similar products with similar (viral) growth styles. A more interesting questions would be this: Is Posterous growing as fast as Tumblr when Tumblr was at this stage/age.<p>Similar articles were written about Facebook and Twitter and now Twitter is getting 370k new accounts per day. It just takes time.<p>Personally, I find the social network features of Tumblr really jumbled and confusing as an outsider. LiveJournal was a social network, too, and it plateaued.

I don't post to either, but Tumblr makes it 100x easier to explore content on the site. Posterous doesn't even try - they bury the "Explore" link on the bottom of the home page and clicking that just gets the visitor a list of random and unorganized posts.

Another very important metric, probably more important than raw traffic is number of users and number of posts to each service. You can get more creative in number of posts per blog per month, recency data (e.g. X% of all users have blogged at least once in the past 90 days) and get an even better picture.<p>Without this kind of context, raw traffic is kinda meaningless. At least the quantcast numbers for both are directly measured and not "estimated".

Maybe I'm completely wrong but to me it always felt like Tumblr landed on a seriously awesome name. There's just something nice about it: simple, clean, clever, cute, and very contemporary. It just feels nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Tumblr's name played a small factor in getting people to come check it out.<p>Sadly I think posterous's name is quite bad. It sounds like a developer came up with it (no offense guys), it doesn't roll off the tongue and it sounds intimidating.<p>These are just my hunches, no data at all to back any of this up, but I do feel like the right name can make a difference.

Tumblr is easy to love as it seems less obliging from the start. It's dashboard is a prime example of KISS, and it's easy to use most of the features as well as not use them at all. I came to Posterous for it's 'autopost' feature which works really fine and I've used it for some time.<p>Both apps are great, Posterous webservices integration beats Tumblr, but the latter wins in terms of 'hanging around' browsing stuff from the community and that's probably the key point of their success in stats.

Is it me or is that not exponential growth?

I wish Tumblr would start charging for something. These services that are completely free worry me in the long run. I've put my heart and soul into writing almost every weekday on my blog. I would be devastated if they ever shut down. I would gladly pay to use it.

I like tumblr - I like that I can point a domain there and essentially get free hosting. Problem is, the system is frequently down. And the way posts are queued to be published is just goofy.

<a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com+posterous.com+wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com+posterous.com+wo...</a><p><i>ahem</i><p>I know people get worked up about new stuff, but that doesn't mean the new stuff is better than the old (often far more reliable, featureful, etc. etc). I went with wordpress.com a couple months ago, and have loved it (with email posting and excellent code highlighting, even for Clojure :-P).

How do either of them make money?<p>Eyeballs are good, but revenue is better.

I evaluated both of these platforms without really thinking that either were competing with each other (although, I guess it's obvious). I found that, yes, Tumblr is huge, more user friendly and community driven, but it's also over-run with 13 year olds posting Twilight pictures, whereas Posterous just felt a little more focused on the single user blogging experience. A lot less clique-influenced. I liked that. It's disheartening to know they're going for the same things Tumblr is.

&#62; However for all of Posterous' hard work and bluster, it's been Tumblr that has grown exponentially over the past year.<p>For <i>very</i> linear implementations of exp()

One word: Beauty.<p>I prefer and use Posterous; but somehow Tumblr seems to be much more beautiful; more Apple-ish. Posterous sites seems more serious.

One of my biggest issues with Tumblr is the way they handle analytics. If you don't spend a couple minutes ahead of time setting up filters, you end up seeing all your own visits to a ton of admin pages like edit, themes, new and a few others. They make it pretty hard to accurately track your metrics.

"Celebrities and big media sites" listed as key to tumblr's recent explosion? No, the secret is the service allowing a HUGE forest of porn compilation sites such as <a href="http://art-or-porn.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://art-or-porn.tumblr.com/</a> and many like it.

I couldn't even get the import from tumblr feature to work on posterous...

No idea about posterous but there are lots of robot created profiles on tumblr (presumably for SEO purposes)