Hi, Tumblr.
It's nice to meet you. — There are lots of reasons we're excited to be launching the Obama 2012 campaign's new Tumblr today. But mostly it's because we're looking at this as an opportunity to create something that's not just ours, but yours, too.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2012 re-election effort is putting its community publishing on Tumblr at the moment the platform has real scale: pageviews grew from roughly 2 billion to 13 billion a month over 2011, and Tumblr closed an $85 million round after overtaking WordPress on traffic late last year. The campaign frames the blog as something shared with supporters rather than a broadcast feed.
For Tumblr, which launched as a lightweight blogging tool back in the Tumblr 3.0 era of 2007, a presidential campaign choosing it over an owned CMS is institutional validation that arrives alongside, not because of, its new funding.
First-order effects
- Obama for America gains a reblog-native channel where supporter-created content propagates without the campaign hand-posting it, complementing its Facebook and Twitter presences.
- Tumblr gets a marquee institutional account and a wave of campaign-driven signups and pageviews on top of its 2011 growth spike.
Second-order effects
- Republican primary campaigns and down-ballot operations face pressure to staff Tumblr accounts of their own or cede the reblog network to the incumbent's organizers.
- Other fast-growing social platforms gain a sales argument with brands and institutions: if a presidential campaign treats this layer as essential, so should marketers weighing where their community budgets go.
Third-order effects
- Campaign infrastructure keeps shifting from owned websites toward rented social platforms, making each campaign's reach partly contingent on a startup's product decisions and uptime.
- Political adoption functions as a legitimacy stamp that accelerates mainstream brand migration to platforms still thin on revenue — the pattern Tumblr's investors were betting on with its 2011 valuation.
The trend: Political campaigns are adopting fast-scaling social platforms as core outreach infrastructure, and that adoption in turn lends those platforms the mainstream legitimacy that drives brand and advertiser migration.