Tumblr finally released its own video feature that allows bloggers to put some video content on their blogs. The market is crowded, all the big names have their own video apps such as Facebook live, Twitch TV, Periscope and so on.
However, besides being a social media platform, the real nature and origins of Tumblr are blogs which are much more personal, and usually more creative than, for example, Facebook accounts. “Live video on Tumblr” wants to impact the scene, and the company has solid numbers to make it seem like a possibility.
According to Statista, the company had 277 million registered accounts in 2015 which doubles the amount from the previous year, and all those users created and uploaded more than 100 billion posts that year. One week after the phone app was released, 75,000 new accounts were registered, and there are almost 40 million registered tumblers only in the United States. All these numbers have been increasing since Yahoo bought the company back in 2009 for $1.1 billion. Money well spent since the company reported 555 million monthly visits earlier this year which translates into a lot of money.
Tumblr introduces live video, but it's completely different than Facebook or Periscope: https://t.co/y1undlWq18 pic.twitter.com/Ni2181LXHv
— Adweek (@Adweek) June 21, 2016
The internet we know today originated from blogs
Tumblr is very different from Twitter and Facebook because even though it is a social media network, it is also based on a microblog community which makes its nature much more different from the previous two. For instance, a Facebook user will take a picture of his dessert and immediately upload it because the idea is to share as much information as possible with the world, but a blogger will spend lots of time creating something that he or she thinks is great without feeling the necessity of sharing it, maybe with a couple of friends, or maybe with the whole Tumblr community. These people want to see cool underground things that are different from what they can find in mainstream social media networks.
One of the intriguing things about live video on Tumblr is that no one really knows what to expect. The company made a portal available where visitors can see close to a dozen “videos” that are not available yet. They have different crazy titles such as “We will inflate a very big thing in a very small room,” “We will broadcast from the surface of Mars,” and so on. There are almost no details about the videos, but according to the website, the videos will start unlocking at around 4 p.m.
It is one of the coolest things Tumblr has. Users can literally create thousands of hours in multimedia content and then, they can “program” when and how it is going to be released. For example, today’s videos could have been recorded weeks ago, but the users could have set the release by June 21, 2016. Judging by the titles it could literally be anything, and a lot of people is expecting something different to what is already available.
Source: TechCrunch