Tumblr Error Reveals Daily Page Views Really 400 Million

Tumblr is the hottest thing in blogging for years. Granted, it's not a traditional, full-blown blogging platform, but its simplicity and focus on social interactivity have paid off, Tumblr's latest stats are truly impressive.

About a month ago, Tumblr reported that it was seeing about 250 million daily page views. That was a huge number, completely overtaking competitors and indicating strong growth in the last year.

Turns out though, the number was way off. Due to an error in how Tumblr measured the page views, the number actually under-reported activity. In fact, Tumblr is now topping 400 million page views every day, and is averaging about 8.4 billion monthly page views.

"Last week we noticed a growing discrepancy between our Google Analytics and Quantcast numbers. It turns out that we broke our Quantcast tracking code a few weeks ago and were no longer reporting any impressions past page one of the Dashboard. We fixed it and quickly saw the Quantcast data jump up to near symmetry with GA," Tumblr cofounder and CEO David Karp told TechCrunch.

And all of this activity is evident in the growing number of blogs hosted by Tumblr as well, there are now about 22 million of them, less than 19 million a bit over a month ago.

Interestingly enough, at the time, we reported that Tumblr was just about to catch up to WordPress.com which hosted slightly over 20 million blogs. WordPress.com is growing as well, of course, but Tumblr is growing faster.

There's no way to know if it managed to overtake it just yet, WordPress has now switched to counting the total number of blogs that uses the software, including self-hosted ones.

WordPress says there are 48.5 million WordPress-powered blogs out there, half of which are on WordPress.com, so if Tumblr hasn't passed it already, it's going to do it within a month.