HN Explorer

Ask HN: Posterous 21.4M views, Tumblr 2.7B. Why?

9 points by srgseg ↗ HN
http://www.quantcast.com/posterous.com

http://www.quantcast.com/tumblr.com

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_leaves_posterous_in_the_dust.php

From the RWW article: "Fred Wilson, whose VC firm is an investor in Tumblr, claimed in April that "Tumblr is more of a social network than Posterous." While Posterous would debate that - it too enables users to follow people, comment and re-blog - the mere fact that Tumblr has many more users than Posterous makes it a more powerful social network."

Any ideas on the fundamental reasons Tumblr is crushing it and Posterous isn't?

9 comments

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scrrr
Failed attempt to describe it by TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/tumblr-1540-percent-pagevie...

I'd say design, wording, layout etc. make Tumblr much more hip than the more business-like posterous. Compare their about-pages: http://www.tumblr.com/about (cool), http://posterous.com/about (boring)

I chose Tumblr over posterous, just because it looks like more fun.

srgseg
Thanks, I missed that article.

I was wondering if there was something deeper to it than just great design - perhaps some kind of special viral loop that tumblr does well that posterous doesn't?

mhd
Because posterous is blogger/livejournal/wordpress--, whereas tumblr is twitter++.
srgseg
Can you elaborate? Both have social features - so why is posterous not twitter+?
foenix
If I can throw something out there: a posterous post has a higher expected word-count than a tumblr post. People will categorize tumblr as twitter with better media features.
phillijw
The 5 times I've attempted to connect to a posterous page, I've had a connection issue or something went wrong. There are technical problems with posterous and they need to get fixed. And it's slow.
jakarta
I think the reason is that Tumblr is pretty hip and it's geared towards these streams of consciousness - type posts.

Most Tumblr blogs seem to consist of random photos posted, maybe a song, or a quote. It's content that is very easy to push out there but is different than Twitter.

If you compare it to Posterous, Posterous still feels too much like a regular blogging platform, so they seem to be targeting different markets.

Usually whenever a friend tells me that they want to start a blog, I suggest opting for a Tumblr account because they are going to be more likely to stick with it and post more often because of the nature of the content that works well with it.

hasenj
The whole "blog by sending email" idea doesn't fly with me.

I tried to give posterous a shot in the past, but was disappointed. I don't exactly remember why, but it didn't strike me as something I'd want to use.

kodeshpa
I like posterous , i use it very extensively but some of my friends think 1 . it is a programmer blog 2. Lacks of themes 3. They can not use for professional website.