Hey Tumblr, U OK, Bro?

Vine&;s body isn&039;t yet in the ground, but Tumblr might already be sweating.

Facebook and Snapchat — the number 1 and 2 most used apps in the U.S., according to App Annie — are so completely dominating today&039;s social media landscape that it&039;s become increasingly difficult for their competitors to find breathing room.

Vine couldn&039;t keep up, and it&039;s on the way out. New entrants like Peach and Ello have spiked and then fallen off spectacularly. Twitter hasn&039;t moved the user number needle in a meaningful way in recent years. And so now it&039;s fair to ask whether Tumblr, another once-great social platform fighting the same uphill battle, will be able to keep up.

When asked if users can expect the platform to stick around for some time, a Tumblr spokesperson declined to comment. But even if Tumblr&039;s not talking, the numbers say it&039;s in far better shape than Vine.

Data from the research firm 7Park Data, shows Tumblr holding relatively steady in usage over the past year and a half, the same time period that Vine plunged. App Annie&039;s data shows a similar pattern.

Yet Tumblr doesn&039;t generate the same mainstream excitement it did before it&039;s Yahoo acquisition. And it&039;s still unclear how its new corporate overlord, Verizon, will treat it.

So, while Tumblr will probably be fine, consumer tech products that don&039;t absolutely crush all-else are always at risk of being disposed of, especially when they sit in a big corporate infrastructure, like Tumblr does. You don&039;t have to go far back to find the demise of beloved consumer products that didn&039;t fit a strategy, and didn&039;t have the numbers to demand a future. Google Reader, an RSS reader with a wildly passionate fanbase, went belly up inside Google in March 2013. Sunrise, a popular calendar app, did the same inside Microsoft this August.

A few years ago, the social media landscape was a relatively level playing field with many social companies standing shoulder to shoulder in competition. But that time has passed. Winners have emerged. It&039;s time for a real reckoning and shakeout. Vine is gone. Tumblr is in better standing, but it will have to work hard to avoid a similar fate.

Quelle: <a href="Hey Tumblr, U OK, Bro?“>BuzzFeed

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