Gen Z Flocks to Tumblr, the One Social Media Millennials Didn’t Ruin

Occupy Wall Avenue, Infamous RBG, cottagecore. These and several other different lasting web developments and IRL actions of the 2010s have been born not on Twitter, on Fb, or within the mainstream media however on Tumblr. You may keep in mind it because the running a blog platform that grew to become one of the hyped startups on the earth earlier than fading into obsolescence — purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 (again when a billion nonetheless felt like a billion), then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the greenback in a distressed sale. That very same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials’ early life, has been having a second amongst Gen Z.

Zoomers have gravitated towards the pseudonymous platform, viewing it as a secure house as the remainder of the social web has turn out to be more and more commodified, polarized, and dominated by life-style influencers. As in its heyday, Tumblr continues to be extra about sharing artwork, tradition, and fandom than particular person standing. Extra posts about anime and punk rock than bridal developments and politics. In 2025, 50% of Tumblr’s energetic month-to-month customers are Gen Zers, as are 60% of recent customers signing up, in accordance with information Tumblr shared with Enterprise Insider. And a number of other of Zoomers’ icons, from the “Fault in Our Stars” creator John Inexperienced to the pop famous person Halsey, have come again to the platform.

“Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s web,” says Amanda Brennan, an web librarian who labored at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her position as head of content material in 2021. She nonetheless makes use of her personal Tumblr repeatedly because the web’s resident meme librarian. “It permits for experimentation that is not tied to your face.”

A part of the explanation younger persons are hanging out on outdated social platforms is that there is nowhere new to go. The tech business is evolving at a slower tempo than it was within the 2000s, and there is much less room for disruption. Huge Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to choose up the scraps left by the early on-line millennials and try to craft them into one thing related. They love Pinterest (based in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and so they’re making an attempt out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip telephones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and studying the dear lesson that typically we glance higher when blurrier. Extra Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, shocking many individuals with its continued existence, simply offered for $207 million. The pattern is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a eager for a time when folks might make errors on the web and transfer previous them.

The pandemic additionally introduced extra Gen Z customers to Tumblr. The running a blog web site was a web based oasis within the barrage of horrifying information and conspiracy theories, due to its acute concentrate on artwork and popular culture. And when different platforms take hits, Tumblr advantages: Person numbers spiked to coincide with the near-banning of TikTok in January and the non permanent ban of X in Brazil final yr. Tumblr appears to be a refuge for folks looking for new social websites. In January, folks launched communities on Tumblr to put up and protect their favourite TikTok movies. In the meantime, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Fb and X as punishment.

Tumblr’s “blessing for it as a consumer is a curse for it as a enterprise,” says Amanda Brennan, Tumblr’s former head of content material.

“Our menu has been full. There’s been no extra space so as to add one thing else,” says Andrew Roth, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the Gen Z-focused analysis and consulting agency DCDX. In a ballot of greater than 600 Zoomers that DCDX carried out in 2024, two-thirds of respondents mentioned they wished their social media presence to turn out to be extra personal. Tumblr could be simply what many younger persons are in search of. “Now the time feels extra ripe for that to occur for Tumblr, even when Tumblr is doing the identical factor or staying in the identical spot.”

Ari Levine, the pinnacle of name partnerships at Tumblr, tells me the platform is each “extra peaceable” and extra resolutely itself than its rivals. Whereas Meta runs round aping its rivals’ options (reels from TikTok, tales from Snapchat), it hasn’t been capable of mimic what Tumblr does (although Meta, then referred to as Fb, was in talks to purchase Tumblr earlier than Yahoo did). “What number of instances am I in an app and I now not know what app I am in?” Levine says.

And Tumblr nonetheless works very like an older web, the place folks have extra management over what they see and rely much less on algorithms. “You curate your personal stuff; it takes a bit of bit of labor to place every little thing in place, however when it is working, you see the content material you need to see,” Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14. He says he sees his weblog as a “stream of consciousness” and a “diary,” one which’s principally made up of reblogging issues he finds attention-grabbing quite than unique posts. In a approach, that is a core a part of what Tumblr has all the time carried out: It’s miles extra targeted on fandom and artwork than it’s round single blogs turning into cults of persona.

Being an iconic and beloved cultural nook does not all the time result in money flows, nonetheless, and the positioning has had a troubled decade. Yahoo purchased Tumblr when Tumblr was one of many world’s fastest-growing social networks, and it promised to not “screw it up.” However Tumblr’s embedded anti-advertising and anti-influencer stances had pushed a wedge between the positioning and monetization. The pseudonymous nature of Tumblr was a direct opposition to Fb’s insistence on customers utilizing their actual names and faces, and the free-flowing grownup content material on the positioning scared advertisers off. Yahoo acquired left behind within the cellular revolution, and Tumblr, too, suffered, with Verizon scooping up each at low cost. In 2018, Tumblr notoriously banned porn and pissed off customers, which led 30% of them to stop. The subsequent yr, Verizon offloaded Tumblr to WordPress’ proprietor, Automattic, for $3 million, 0.3% of what Yahoo had paid for it.

Below Automattic, Tumblr is lastly within the house that serves it, Levine says. “We have had ups and downs alongside the best way, however we’re in essentially the most attention-grabbing place and place that we have been in 18 years,” he says. The positioning is making an attempt to maintain what its customers love whereas unveiling options that do rival a few of its rivals’. It is a shift after years of staying distinctly itself. In December, Tumblr launched its Communities characteristic, a form of Fb Teams meets subreddits through which folks can be a part of teams primarily based on particular pursuits, like making artwork of “foolish bugs” or emo youngsters from the Midwest. In January, Tumblr additionally launched a TikTok competitor referred to as Tumblr TV, which works like a search engine for GIFs and helps movies. And following media corporations (together with BI) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a take care of OpenAI and Midjourney to permit the techniques to coach on Tumblr posts.

How will we really monetize folks’s intentions on social media versus the eye of them being round?

Andrew Roth, founder and CEO of the consulting agency DCDX

However Tumblr is the Tenth-most-popular social media web site within the US, dwarfed by Fb, Instagram, and X, in accordance with information from the analytics agency Similarweb. (Tumblr declined to supply whole consumer numbers to BI, however Levine says it has seen regular progress.) Its customers see that as a professional quite than a con; it is extra unique and intentional. However its historical past of utmost waves in valuation and struggles to become profitable could dictate its destiny greater than those that weblog there. “I would like Tumblr to flourish,” Brennan says. “I would like it to exist ceaselessly. I need to use it ceaselessly. I believe that it is without doubt one of the most stunning areas on the web for somebody to determine who they’re.” However a few of Tumblr’s mannequin is a “blessing for it as a consumer is a curse for it as a enterprise.”

The platform may benefit if it capitalized on the “shift from consideration to intention,” Roth tells me. “How will we really monetize folks’s intentions on social media versus the eye of them being round?” That might imply a concentrate on “folks’s wishes” and the best way to “assist them attain them.” Tumblr not too long ago put out a prolonged report for entrepreneurs making an attempt to achieve Gen Z, advising them to interact with communities round their manufacturers and to seek for related curiosity amongst customers over the attain of mainstream influencers. Levine tells me that when Automattic acquired Tumblr, it was an opportunity for the corporate to take “inventory of the place we’re” and “reintroduce ourselves” to customers and “manufacturers and advertisers who assist us pay the payments.”

Tumblr loyalists inform me they have not spent a lot time with the brand new options — they like the positioning the best way it’s. TJ Smith, a 25-year-old from Texas, says it offered a secure haven for them after they have been 13. Recognized as autistic at 11, Smith discovered Tumblr a neater place to attach with and discuss their favourite fandoms, just like the Percy Jackson sequence. Ultimately, it helped them work by way of their sexuality and gender id (they establish as pansexual and gender fluid). “Tumblr was the primary place the place I noticed these phrases getting used,” Smith tells me.

Most Tumblr blogs aren’t in regards to the individuals who make them, but they’re deeply private locations. Below their pseudonyms and artwork, folks discover communities and discover identities with out scrutiny from IRL family and friends. Ashmita Shanthakumar, a 25-year-old from Utah who has been on Tumblr since 2013, sees it as “anti-social media,” she tells me, and has used it to attach with individuals who like the identical CW superhero exhibits as she did. She will concentrate on how the exhibits make her really feel quite than private updates on Fb, which may really feel comparative.

The social web is fractured. Millennials are operating Reddit. Gen Xers and Child Boomers have a house on Fb. Bluesky, one of many new X alternate options, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, however they’ve to this point generated extra hype than affect. Folks of various ages migrate in numbers to numerous platforms and seize them, creating the vibes and tradition there. Platforms lean extra left or proper politically. And whereas some (totally on the suitable) have cried “echo chamber” with derision, there are advantages to carving out smaller communities with like-minded folks to see and speak in regards to the belongings you like. Megaplatforms can flatten our on-line experiences and reward content material that matches a mildew; smaller communities can enrich them.

I not too long ago unearthed the Tumblr weblog I made in highschool (do not go searching — I deleted it and my teenage musings instantly). After I scrolled by way of Tumblr for the primary time in not less than a decade, I spotted it nonetheless had one thing that no different social community did: the sense of timelessness. I noticed a put up of a easy, soothing coloration gradient adopted by a current reblog of a GIF posted in 2020 however taken from the 2002 unique “Spider-Man” film. There’s nonetheless little video on the feed, and it is extra of a silent, visible retreat, with cuts of film scenes overlaid with dialogue on a loop. After I open TikTok and Instagram, I am bombarded by filtered faces and music, or somebody yelling into the digital camera to promote me a pair of magnetic eyelashes each few movies. Tumblr was the place I went in 2011 to see and reblog flash pictures and ’90s film GIFs, so it is no shock that it is now not a spot the place a long time of photos are juxtaposed collectively, however one which has itself turn out to be a bit of nostalgia for a less complicated time on-line. In contrast to a few of its 2000s friends, Tumblr does not must struggle to get its cool again, but it surely does have to seek out methods to maintain its cool and transfer ahead.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Enterprise Insider overlaying the tech business. She writes in regards to the largest tech corporations and developments.