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40 free Tumblr trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tumblr started as a side project squeezed between client jobs and grew into one of the internet's strangest and most influential corners. For a few years it set the tone for online humor, fandom and visual style, and its jokes still escape into the wider world. This quiz follows the whole story: the people who built the site, the corporate owners who bought and sold it, the features that gave it a language of its own, and the policy fights that sent users packing. It also covers the culture Tumblr produced, from viral posts and invented films to a fan convention that went wrong. It is written for anyone who ever kept a blog there, and for the curious who only know the screenshots. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which web giant bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, then wrote down most of that value by 2016?
Yahoo
Yahoo announced the deal in May 2013, and nearly 170,000 unhappy Tumblr users signed a petition against it.
Q 02Tumblr users dreamed up 'Goncharov', a 1973 mafia film that never existed, and credited it to which real director?
Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese played along with the joke, which grew out of an odd label on a pair of knockoff boots.
Q 03A 2015 Tumblr post of a dress chosen for a Scottish wedding split the internet; what colors was the actual garment?
Blue and black
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.
Q 04Tumblr lost nearly a third of its traffic within months of banning what kind of posts in December 2018?
Adult content
Adult content had been a notable draw for the site, and the automated filters enforcing the ban wrongly flagged many harmless images.
Q 05In 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.
Q 06Which sitting world leader joined Tumblr in October 2011, more than four years after the platform launched?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama signed up at a time when half of Tumblr's visitors were under the age of 25.
Q 07The 2011 Tumblr blog 'We Are the 99 Percent' gave which wave of protests over wealth inequality its slogan?
The Occupy movement
The Occupy movement took up the phrase after an activist known only as Chris launched the blog with Priscilla Grim in August 2011.
Q 08The 'Doge' meme, spread in part by a Tumblr blog of Comic Sans captions, features photos of which dog breed?
Shiba Inu
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.
Q 09Which entrepreneur launched Tumblr in 2007 at the age of 20 and stayed on as its chief executive for a decade?
David Karp
David Karp never earned a high school diploma, having left school in his mid-teens to study at home and work on software.
Q 10What is Tumblr's term for re-posting someone else's post to your own page with credit to the original?
Reblog
Reblog chains let users stack comments on a post, and a 2015 change that stopped people trimming those chains drew criticism from users.
Q 11Which company bought Tumblr in 2019 for a reported price below $3 million, a sliver of its 2013 value?
Automattic
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, reportedly paid less than 0.3% of what the site had fetched six years earlier.
Q 12DashCon, a 2014 convention for Tumblr users, became a lasting meme thanks to which attraction in a near-empty hall?
A ball pit
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.
Q 13SuperWhoLock, a Tumblr mash-up of Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock, was known for stories built from what?
Animated GIFs
Q 21Within a day of a 2012 presidential debate, a Tumblr blog was mocking which candidate's remark about binders of women?
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney had been describing résumés of female job applicants that were sent to him as governor of Massachusetts.
Q 22Which aesthetic of rural life, traditional crafts and slow living was first named on Tumblr in 2018?
Cottagecore
Cottagecore posts on Tumblr rose 150% between March and May 2020, as lockdowns kept people at home.
Q 23Which telecoms giant became Tumblr's owner in 2017 and sold the struggling site just two years later?
Verizon
Verizon folded Tumblr into a division called Oath, where the site kept struggling until it was put up for sale.
Animated GIFs were strung into 'GIF fics', short crossover tales that fans invented because the three shows barely reference each other.
Q 14Tumblr's first technology chief, Marco Arment, left in 2010 to focus on which tool for saving web pages to read later?
Instapaper
Instapaper was his own creation, and he sold a controlling stake in it to Betaworks in 2013.
Q 15Which company pulled Tumblr's app from its store in November 2018, weeks before the platform's sweeping content ban?
Apple
Apple removed the app after illegal images slipped past Tumblr's filters, and restored it about a month later.
Q 16On Tumblr, the running total of a post's likes, comments and re-posts is displayed under what name?
Notes
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.
Q 17Which podcast's cast canceled a 2014 DashCon appearance after being told to pay for their own hotel rooms?
Welcome to Night Vale
Welcome to Night Vale had exploded on Tumblr the previous summer, drawing more than 20,000 posts in a single week of July 2013.
Q 18A webcomic that began as a Tumblr blog deletes which cat from his own strip, leaving his owner talking to himself?
Garfield
Garfield's creator Jim Davis approved of the edits, and an official book set the altered strips beside the originals in 2008.
Q 19The meme 'Dat Boi', which grew popular on Tumblr in 2015, shows a frog riding what?
A unicycle
A unicycle carries the frog, whose animation was made for a clip-art website in 2003, long before anyone turned it into a meme.
Q 20A 2012 Tumblr blog imagined the text messages of which American politician, pictured in sunglasses with a BlackBerry?
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, and the photo caught her on a diplomatic trip to Libya.
Q 24Which chief executive, once Google's first female software engineer, led the $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr in 2013?
Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer had been employee number 20 at Google, and she left Tumblr's young founder in charge after the deal.
Q 25Which co-founder of the WordPress software became Tumblr's ultimate boss when his company bought the platform in 2019?
Matt Mullenweg
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.
Q 26Rather than Silicon Valley, Tumblr kept its headquarters for years in which American city, its founder's birthplace?
New York
New York City housed Tumblr at 770 Broadway, while its user support team worked from an office in Richmond, Virginia.
Q 27Tumblr users are known for adding jokes and commentary in which part of a post, leaving the original unchanged?
The tags
The tags can each run to 140 characters and may include spaces, which leaves room for whole sentences of commentary.
Q 28Tumblr's instant messaging, introduced in 2015, replaced which older feature for writing to blogs a user followed?
Fan mail
Fan mail was retired as messaging spread virally: it began with 1,500 users, and anyone they messaged gained access too.
Q 29Which Southeast Asian country blocked Tumblr in February 2016, then reversed the decision shortly afterwards?
Indonesia
Indonesia lifted the block after asking Tumblr to police its own explicit pages; China, Iran and Kazakhstan have also blocked the site.
Q 30What nickname did Tumblr users give a 2015 scandal over human remains allegedly taken from a New Orleans cemetery?
Boneghazi
Boneghazi blends 'bone' with Benghazi, and the saga ended with police searching the collector's home in January 2016.