After X's ban in Brazil, Tumblr reports ~350% user growth

Bluesky isn’t the only social networking service to benefit from X’s ban in Brazil, now under legal penalties. Tumblr this week is also reporting an increase in both active users and blog creation, the company tells TechCrunch.

According to Tumblr, in the days since the X ban in Brazil, the site saw 222.99% growth in communities and 349.55% growth in users. More specifically, Tumblr’s daily active users in Brazil have shot up by 30% from the 110,000 it was seeing, on average, in the days ahead of the ban.

What’s more, the new users aren’t just visiting the site, they’re creating accounts, too, Tumblr claims. The company says blog creation and community joins have also increased. (The company didn’t provide metrics on this front, however.)

Of those users who joined communities, Tumblr found that the percentage of daily active users in Brazil was also five times higher than those in the rest of the world.

The increase on Tumblr is not as significant as what’s been happening on Bluesky, however. Following X’s ban in the country, large numbers of Brazilian users began establishing accounts on the decentralized social networking startup. At one point, half a million users had joined Bluesky’s service over a two-day period. The company that had just 6 million users as of May 2024 has topped 10 million and continues to grow.

Still, any jump in usage could be beneficial for Tumblr, presuming it wants to continue to sell ads in the long term. The age-old blogging site and social platform was acquired by WordPress.com maker Automattic in 2022 for $3 million, down from the $1 billion Yahoo (TechCrunch’s parent company) once paid for it back in 2017. Since then, the company has been losing money at a rate of $30 million per year, CEO Matt Mullenweg said last July. As a result, Automattic absorbed nearly 140 people from Tumblr’s staff, reassigning them to other projects at the company. More recently, it said it would move Tumblr’s half a billion blogs to WordPress on the back end to improve efficiencies.