40 Fun Facts About Tumblr

Which web giant bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, then wrote down most of that value by 2016?

Yahoo announced the deal in May 2013, and nearly 170,000 unhappy Tumblr users signed a petition against it.

Tumblr users dreamed up 'Goncharov', a 1973 mafia film that never existed, and credited it to which real director?

Martin Scorsese played along with the joke, which grew out of an odd label on a pair of knockoff boots.

A 2015 Tumblr post of a dress chosen for a Scottish wedding split the internet; what colors was the actual garment?

Blue and black was the true coloring, yet the lighting fooled so many people that the post drew 14,000 views a second at its peak.

Tumblr lost nearly a third of its traffic within months of banning what kind of posts in December 2018?

Adult content had been a notable draw for the site, and the automated filters enforcing the ban wrongly flagged many harmless images.

In 2022 Tumblr began selling two checkmarks for $7.99 as a joke at the expense of which rival's paid verification?

Twitter had just started charging $8 a month for a single verification check, so Tumblr boasted that its offer was cheaper because buyers got two.

Which sitting world leader joined Tumblr in October 2011, more than four years after the platform launched?

Barack Obama signed up at a time when half of Tumblr's visitors were under the age of 25.

The 2011 Tumblr blog 'We Are the 99 Percent' gave which wave of protests over wealth inequality its slogan?

The Occupy movement took up the phrase after an activist known only as Chris launched the blog with Priscilla Grim in August 2011.

The 'Doge' meme, spread in part by a Tumblr blog of Comic Sans captions, features photos of which dog breed?

A Shiba Inu named Kabosu is the face of the meme, which grew from a 2010 photo and later lent its name to a cryptocurrency.

Which entrepreneur launched Tumblr in 2007 at the age of 20 and stayed on as its chief executive for a decade?

David Karp never earned a high school diploma, having left school in his mid-teens to study at home and work on software.

What is Tumblr's term for re-posting someone else's post to your own page with credit to the original?

Reblog chains let users stack comments on a post, and a 2015 change that stopped people trimming those chains drew criticism from users.

Which company bought Tumblr in 2019 for a reported price below $3 million, a sliver of its 2013 value?

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, reportedly paid less than 0.3% of what the site had fetched six years earlier.

DashCon, a 2014 convention for Tumblr users, became a lasting meme thanks to which attraction in a near-empty hall?

A ball pit roughly the size of a kiddie pool became the joke after organizers offered an 'extra hour' in it to make up for a canceled panel.

SuperWhoLock, a Tumblr mash-up of Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock, was known for stories built from what?

Animated GIFs were strung into 'GIF fics', short crossover tales that fans invented because the three shows barely reference each other.

Tumblr's first technology chief, Marco Arment, left in 2010 to focus on which tool for saving web pages to read later?

Instapaper was his own creation, and he sold a controlling stake in it to Betaworks in 2013.

Which company pulled Tumblr's app from its store in November 2018, weeks before the platform's sweeping content ban?

Apple removed the app after illegal images slipped past Tumblr's filters, and restored it about a month later.

On Tumblr, the running total of a post's likes, comments and re-posts is displayed under what name?

Notes are listed with the original poster first, and a 2026 change to how they were assigned was reversed within a day after a backlash.

Which podcast's cast canceled a 2014 DashCon appearance after being told to pay for their own hotel rooms?

Welcome to Night Vale had exploded on Tumblr the previous summer, drawing more than 20,000 posts in a single week of July 2013.

A webcomic that began as a Tumblr blog deletes which cat from his own strip, leaving his owner talking to himself?

Garfield's creator Jim Davis approved of the edits, and an official book set the altered strips beside the originals in 2008.

The meme 'Dat Boi', which grew popular on Tumblr in 2015, shows a frog riding what?

A unicycle carries the frog, whose animation was made for a clip-art website in 2003, long before anyone turned it into a meme.

A 2012 Tumblr blog imagined the text messages of which American politician, pictured in sunglasses with a BlackBerry?

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, and the photo caught her on a diplomatic trip to Libya.

Within a day of a 2012 presidential debate, a Tumblr blog was mocking which candidate's remark about binders of women?

Mitt Romney had been describing résumés of female job applicants that were sent to him as governor of Massachusetts.

Which aesthetic of rural life, traditional crafts and slow living was first named on Tumblr in 2018?

Cottagecore posts on Tumblr rose 150% between March and May 2020, as lockdowns kept people at home.

Which telecoms giant became Tumblr's owner in 2017 and sold the struggling site just two years later?

Verizon folded Tumblr into a division called Oath, where the site kept struggling until it was put up for sale.

Which chief executive, once Google's first female software engineer, led the $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr in 2013?

Marissa Mayer had been employee number 20 at Google, and she left Tumblr's young founder in charge after the deal.

Which co-founder of the WordPress software became Tumblr's ultimate boss when his company bought the platform in 2019?

Matt Mullenweg said Tumblr would run as a complement to WordPress.com, and in 2023 he revealed the site was losing $30 million a year.

Rather than Silicon Valley, Tumblr kept its headquarters for years in which American city, its founder's birthplace?

New York City housed Tumblr at 770 Broadway, while its user support team worked from an office in Richmond, Virginia.

Tumblr users are known for adding jokes and commentary in which part of a post, leaving the original unchanged?

The tags can each run to 140 characters and may include spaces, which leaves room for whole sentences of commentary.

Tumblr's instant messaging, introduced in 2015, replaced which older feature for writing to blogs a user followed?

Fan mail was retired as messaging spread virally: it began with 1,500 users, and anyone they messaged gained access too.

Which Southeast Asian country blocked Tumblr in February 2016, then reversed the decision shortly afterwards?

Indonesia lifted the block after asking Tumblr to police its own explicit pages; China, Iran and Kazakhstan have also blocked the site.

What nickname did Tumblr users give a 2015 scandal over human remains allegedly taken from a New Orleans cemetery?

Boneghazi blends 'bone' with Benghazi, and the saga ended with police searching the collector's home in January 2016.

In February 2018 Tumblr switched on which filter for sensitive posts by default, leaving users to opt out?

Safe Mode lost its off switch in the Android app later that year, shortly before a much wider content ban was announced.

Marco Arment became Tumblr's lead developer after answering a job advert the founder had posted on which website?

Craigslist brought the pair together at a small consultancy, where they built Tumblr during a two-week gap between client contracts.

Before Tumblr, its teenage founder was head of product at which online parenting forum, sold to CNET in 2006?

UrbanBaby hired him after he finished a rush job in four hours, and selling his shares later paid for his own consultancy.

Tumblr's founder began his career as a young intern at which animation company, building its first blogging platform?

Frederator Studios was run by producer Fred Seibert, who went on to become one of Tumblr's early investors.

In 2012 which sportswear brand ran Tumblr's first major advertising campaign, built around an official soccer blog?

Adidas bought ad placements in users' feeds only two months after Tumblr announced it would turn to paid advertising.

Tumblr's familiar wordmark logo is set in a lightly modified version of which serif typeface?

Bookman Old Style belongs to a typeface family that dates to the 1860s and is closely tied to the advertising look of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2022 Tumblr's boss pledged to support which decentralized social protocol, the standard behind Mastodon?

ActivityPub links independently run servers into the Fediverse, and Flipboard and Threads have made the same pledge.

Tumblr's invented mafia film 'Goncharov' was imagined as taking place in which Italian city?

Naples is also the setting of Gomorrah, a 2008 crime film whose poster closely resembled the boot label that started the joke.

As a teenager, Tumblr's founder moved alone for five months to which Asian capital while working for a parenting site?

Tokyo came after the Japanese classes he had started taking once he left school to study at home.

DashCon 2, a 2025 follow-up to the notorious Tumblr convention, took place in which Canadian city?

Toronto hosted a sequel run by an unrelated team, and unlike the 2014 original it was considered a success.