Tumblr, the microblog known as a GIF artist haven and a home to memes like Texts From Hillary Clinton, is one of the top 20 most visited websites in the U.S.
In an announcement made today, Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp confirmed that the site now collects 20 billion pageviews a month, up from about 13 billion in September, GigaOM reported.
“This started pretty modestly as something I wanted for myself,” Karp told GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram. “I remember very vividly that moment where I was like, it wouldn’t be much more work to add a column to the database that [asked] which user posted this post and maybe make it something other people can use.”
Karp credits Tumblr’s growing smartphone market with helping to push it to the 20 billion mark, although he didn’t reveal exactly how much of the site’s traffic comes from its mobile apps.
Tumblr was founded in February 2007. Today it collects more than 77 million posts a day across 79 million blogs.
Tumblr’s 20 billion monthly pageviews rank it as one of the most visited sites in the world. In July 2011 the microblog was number 92 on a list of Google’s top 1,000 most visited sites in the world. If Tumblr’s current pageview number was used instead, it would now rank somewhere in the top 25 of that same list.
Facebook, the world’s leading social network which registered its 1 billionth user on Oct. 4, collects more than 1 trillion pageviews a month, according to Google’s top 1,000 list. Twitter collects more than 5.9 billion pageviews per month, despite the fact that a bulk of its users visit Twitter via mobile apps and not its website..
In September Reddit collected 3.4 billion pageviews and in October Etsy reported 1.4 billion.
It is unclear where Tumblr currently lists in the top 20 websites in the U.S., but according to Quantcast it is number 19. The top spot currently belongs to Google.
The question is, how many GIFs of cats will it take to surpass the search engine giant?
