With Great Communities Behind them, Tumblr and Reddit See Huge Traffic Growth

In the world of Facebook and Twitter, two sites that have Web 2.0 written all over them are not only making by, but growing at huge rates. Blogging, for the everyday user, lost its appeal years ago, but Tumblr's take on has led it into becoming one of the fastest growing community-driven sites around.

Same goes for Reddit, it's form of news aggregation died along with Digg, yet, due to a number of smart design choices and great community, it too manages to grow at huge rates.

The latest Tumblr stats show that the site is about to blow past the 10 billion posts mark. With 40 million or so new posts published everyday, it's not about to slow down any time soon.

For comparison, WordPress.com gets about half a million new posts each day. Of course, that's a testament to the different style of blogging each represents, WordPress.com is more for traditional blogs while Tumblr's killer feature is the "reblog" button.

Whatever the case, it's working for Tumblr which gets more than 12 billion page views per month, compared to WordPress.com's 2.5 billion from 293 million visitors. Tumblr has significantly fewer visitors.

Reddit on the other hand has seen its visitor numbers triple in the past year or so. As with Tumblr, the secret seems to be in making it as easy as possible for users to consume and share great content.

"Over the past 15 months, reddit has tripled in size. Since last May, we’ve grown from 7 million monthly unique visitors to 21.5 million. Our pageviews have exploded 4x to a staggering 1.6 billion pages served per month," Reddit announced.

"The most important fact is that reddit is not a single community; it's an engine for creating communities," the post read and went on to describe how the different communities, subreddits, are one of the key elements of the site.