Tumblr in 2012 and How the Gifset Redefined Blogging
By 2012, Tumblr was one of the world's top websites — mostly thanks to pop culture fans posting animated gifs of their favorite music, tv and movie stars. Blogging would never be the same again.
When 20-year old David Karp launched Tumblr in February 2007, he positioned his new product as an easy-to-use alternative to traditional blogging software. The emphasis was on fun and sharing, rather than writing and editing.
The name, Tumblr, was derived from the term “tumblelog.” According to blogger Jason Kottke in October 2005, a tumblelog was "a quick and dirty stream of consciousness." But Karp's conception was more multimedia-oriented — as the original Tumblr homepage stated, "tumblelogs are blogs with less fuss and more stuff." He added that he was "certain it will be a fabulous alternative to the 90% of web users who don’t care to maintain a blog.”
He was right about that. Over the next five years, Tumblr became an internet sensation — in popularity, far outstripping the “blogosphere” that defined the first decade of the 21st century on the back of tools like Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type.
The Fandom Web
At its peak, Tumblr was about expressing yourself with multimedia. It was a place to play around with images and short videos, which in turn meant it was perfect for fandoms in popular culture. Music, movies, tv shows, books, art movements — it was all available to be remixed and remade on Tumblr. And unlike with YouTube, copyright didn't become an issue on Tumblr, because typically only small snippets of copyrighted video or imagary were used (also, Tumblr memes were marketing gold to the entertainment industry!).
Other than perhaps Twitter and Reddit, by 2012 Tumblr was the best place on the internet to connect with people in your favorite fan subcultures. Even better, there was no pressure to create original content. At the click of a button, you could "reblog" the colorful posts of other Tumblr users. Indeed, you could create an entire aesthetic out of other peoples' creations (this is how I myself used Tumblr).
A New World of Gifsets
The gifset — a collection of animated gifs — came to epitomize Tumblr's quirky appeal. You really have to see one to understand. So here's a video screenshot of a David Bowie gifset, from a Tumblr that is now sadly defunct. Each of the six images is an animated GIF, all moving at the same time in a mesmerising sync.
This gifset illustrates what Tumblr is best at: multimedia posts that tell a kind of mini-story about a subject. As Bowie himself might have said, it’s all about the sound and vision.
Gifsets emerged in 2011, if we're to believe a Tumblr user named The Frogman, who claims to have "posted the very first GIFset" on July 14, 2011. That was the day a new photoset feature launched on Tumblr. According to The Frogman:
"My first thought was, 'Does it work with GIFs?' Then I saw you could make a 3x3 grid, it reminded me of the Brady Bunch intro, and the rest is Tumblr history."
It's likely other Tumblr users tried the same thing at the same time as The Frogman, but regardless, gifsets quickly became a core feature of Tumblr. No other blog or social media product had anything quite like it — and that's still the case today.
Gifsets became especially useful for sharing scenes from tv shows and movies. Even by mid-2012, they had become quite an elaborate short-form storytelling mechanism for the web. In this video screenshot of a Tumblr post in July 2012, a user has re-created his favorite scene in the 2012 movie, The Amazing Spider-Man:
Lana on Tumblr
The music and aesthetic of Lana Del Rey, who had become an internet star in 2011 thanks to YouTube, was a perfect match for Tumblr. On January 27, 2012, she released her first major-label album, Born to Die. That same month, an official Tumblr account was opened for her.
It somewhat mirrored her official website (also new), in that it promoted her latest album and singles. But Lana's Tumblr also re-blogged a lot of content from her fans on Tumblr — and this is where the most interesting content originated.
A good example of a fan site from that era is Born to Lana, a Tumblr that began in April 2012 and was active for about the next ten years. Here's a video screenshot showing what the homepage looked like in June 2012. There's a lot of Lana and a lot of animation effects.
A big part of the appeal of Tumblr in 2012 was the ability to explore a mood or feeling, via the aesthetic of an artist like Lana Del Rey. You didn't need to write any words — just posting a set of GIFs (or photos) was sufficient to express yourself. MySpace had some of this in the mid-2000s, but with Tumblr the process of posting in a visually impressionistic manner became so much easier.
This Lana gifset from September 2012 is illustrative of the simple — yet powerful — online artistry that Tumblr enabled. It was created by formerlylohan.tumblr.com.
Tumblr: This is the Way
By the end of 2012, Tumblr had established itself as one of the most important online products of the era. In a feature article dated January 2, 2013, Fortune’s Jeff Bercovici wrote that Tumblr was now one of the world’s “top ten online destinations,” with “tens of millions of registered users” running around 86 million blogs.
Tumblr was about “people expressing themselves publicly,” Bercovici noted. He didn’t even mention the blogosphere in his article, because by 2012 it was no longer a valid point of comparison. Instead, he compared Tumblr to the two social media sensations of that time, Facebook and Twitter:
“But it's far more sensory and emotive, a swirl of photographs, songs, inside jokes, animated cartoons and virtual warm fuzzies.”
Prior to Tumblr's emergence, short-form blogging was known as 'microblogging' — and it was a mostly textual format, best exemplified by Twitter. The golden age of microblogging was between 2007-2011, but by 2012 Tumblr had taken over online culture. From now on, multimedia — and not text — would define short-form posting.
Pretty soon, it was gifs galore on Twitter and Facebook too.
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
- eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play
Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.