

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

http://www.quantcast.com/posterous.com<p>http://www.quantcast.com/tumblr.com<p>http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_leaves_posterous_in_the_dust.php<p>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."<p>Any ideas on the fundamental reasons Tumblr is crushing it and Posterous isn't?
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scrrr
Failed attempt to describe it by TechCrunch:
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/tumblr-1540-percent-
pagevie...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/tumblr-1540-percent-pageview-
growth/)

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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mhd
Because posterous is blogger/livejournal/wordpress--, whereas tumblr is
twitter++.

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srgseg
Can you elaborate? Both have social features - so why is posterous not
twitter+?

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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.

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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.

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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.

