Given a choice between the word “Tumblr” and “blog”, just which of the two would you think would have generated more search instances on Google? Perhaps blogs are in a decline, but we do know that there is still life in them yet, although you might be surprised to find out that “Tumblr” has surpassed “blog” as one of the most searched terms on Google for this year.
The first time this ever happened was in December last month, taking just 5 years since the microblog network kicked off in February 2007, according to Laura Olin, Outbound social media director. Google’s search stats pointed out that the word “blog” has been on a decline since May 2009, and that was roughly the time when Twitter ended up as the third highest ranked social network according to visits, and Tumblr was not even part of the top 25 list.
This could be due to the fact that time, being a precious commodity for everyone, would mean folks are more selective in their reading, and it also takes less time to put up a funny or interesting link on someone’s Facebook Wall, or to tweet about it. Instead of spending time reading 20 blogs, folks might just read 10 blogs that they really, really want to read these days. Do you think that the ultimate end of blogs would be to end up in a niche topic market like tech blogs or news blogs?