George Takei has made a interesting move last month when he launched his own Tumblr blog to support his love of sharing memes, funny images and random fan generated animated gifs. It’s a sure sign of support for the Tumblr platform that has passed 20 billion page views from 61 million monthly visitors and is now ranked in top 14 websites in the US across according to Quantcast.
The Tumblr platform consists of short form blog posts, images and photos and has also finally passed WordPress.com it’s long form blog competitor in the battle for audience page views. The decision for George Takei to pick Tumblr over WordPress VIP does relate to the type of content that he shares but is also a signal that Tumblr is a much better platform and looking at each post has far higher engagement that WordPress blogs typically achieve.
George Takei already has a large social media presence across Facebook (3 million Fans), Google+ (123,429 Circled him), Pinterest (224,665 Followers) and Twitter (510,138 followers). It will be interesting to see if his audience starts to grow tired of his content as his audience aggressively re-shares this across all social platforms just like Robert Scoble did in his “war on noise” post. The question will be how Takei adjusts his sharing behaviour so different content may be shared that is unique to Tumblr and not just reposting everything he posts on Twitter & Facebook.
This is a very strong vote of confidence for Tumblr by a fairly high profile and very socially active celebrity and will be interesting how many fans join him on Tumblr and how WordPress.com might respond to attract some other high profile celebrities. The key factor for Tumblr’s platform growth is having power bloggers like George Takei that attract new members to signup so they can engage, share or reblog the content he shares.