Reddit has quarantined subreddit r/Russia due to misinformation, as the internationally condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into its sixth day. r/RussiaPolitics has also been quarantined, just days after it was created in order to host invasion-related discussions.
Quarantined subreddits don't show up in searches, recommendations, or feeds in which a user hasn't specifically included them (such as r/Popular or r/All). Further, anyone who finds their way to a quarantined community is shown a warning regarding the content, which they must acknowledge in order to access it.
In the case of r/Russia, the message now warns that this subreddit contains "a high volume of information not supported by credible sources."
r/russia now bears a quarantine notice at the top of the subreddit.Credit: Mashable
While many online communities have loudly decried Russia's recent attack on Ukraine, it's unsurprising that r/Russia has a significantly different perspective on the conflict. A subreddit dedicated to "[e]verything related to the country of Russia," r/Russia's top posts over the past few days have overwhelmingly justified or defended the invasion. This included allegations that Ukraine is spreading propaganda and misinformation, claims Ukrainian soldiers are Nazis who are harming people, and calls for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be tried as a war criminal.
Though there have certainly been elements of truth in some posts, such as disturbing reports of Ukrainian soldiers and officials discriminating againstnon-white refugees, a larger portion of the invasion-related content posted to r/Russia has been without basis, mischaracterised, or quicklydebunked. Due to these dis- and misinformation issues, Reddit has now added r/Russia to its list of quarantined communities, just like r/The_Donald before it.
"We are clear in our policies that moderators and users may not attempt to manipulate and interfere with the conversations or communities on our platform," a Reddit spokesperson told Mashable.
"In line with these policies, we have quarantined r/Russia and r/RussiaPolitics and removed a moderator for acting in bad faith. We have connected directly with the remaining moderators to provide guidance and remind them of our policies. We will continue to monitor the situation and take additional steps as needed."
Redditors now have to specifically opt in to see content from r/russia.Credit: Mashable
Further restrictions such as the removal of custom styles can also be applied to quarantined subreddits. While r/Russia previously had a Russian flag header image as well as a photograph of Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow as its background, both are now blank.
As is often the case in issues of misinformation, r/Russia users are characterising Reddit's quarantine as censorship and an attack on freedom of speech. Over 265,000 redditors were subscribed to r/Russia as of Feb. 28.
Meanwhile, protests against Russia's invasion of Ukraine have been held all over the globe — including in Russia itself. Over 5,000 Russians have been arrested at these protests since the invasion began, making it clear that many don't support their country's actions.
A cultural moment can happen in an instant and dominate news feeds for days. The constant feed refreshing, the group DMs, the memes—it all combines to create a uniquely gripping spectacle that’s impossible to ignore.
These periods of high engagement are typically brought on by a real-time event or the onset of a new trend. In best-case scenarios, they create conversations that unite people over shared interests. It’s no wonder brands are eager to hop on these opportunities for cultural advertising.
That said, not all moments spark the same kinds of conversation. Culture moments can range from fun and lighthearted to serious and nuanced. More often than not, they’re a mixture of both.
Understanding your brand’s role in these high-value occasions can make or break your social media presence. In this how-to guide, we’ll share how to spot, vet and contribute to cultural moments in ways that resonate with your audience.
Let your values align your brand to cultural moments
Your core values should serve as a north star for all your marketing efforts, including your cultural advertising plays. It sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. After all, cultural moments don’t come with brand guidelines.
To better understand how a social media movement aligns with your values, you’ll need to put your research cap on. Here are a few questions to think through as you get familiar with the conversation:
What caused the spike in conversations? An inciting event can take even the most common topic and push it into the limelight. However, these inciting events aren’t always positive. Before creating social content around a moment, dig into what’s causing the conversation. If it’s scandal, outrage or negativity, you may want to steer clear.
Who’s talking about it? Look into the people, brands and media outlets that are present in the conversation. Is there overlap with your target audience? Do you recognize any key contributors? Are any of your competitors showing up?
What conversations are happening? A single cultural moment can spark a variety of reactions. Condense the conversation into a few major buckets to identify how your brand can best contribute.
How do people feel about it? Remember: cultural moments are often nuanced. A conversation might be all fun and games at the surface but touch on some hard topics when you dive a few layers deep. If the conversation makes you feel out of your depth as a brand, you may want to opt for strategic silence.
As you work through these questions, you may identify gaps between the moment and your brand purpose. Don’t be afraid to sit out on a cultural advertising opportunity if it feels too forced. Not chiming into a discussion can be FOMO-inducing, but it’s better to stay silent than to share something inauthentic to your brand.
How to find the cultural moment that matters most to your customers
A cultural moment may align with your brand values, but if your customers aren’t talking about it, contributing to the conversation may fall flat.
Thanks to media fragmentation and the 24-hour news cycle, there have been some drastic changes in what counts as a moment. In the past, a single event could captivate audiences for weeks. Now, small-scale cultural moments happen all the time. How much they matter all depends on who you’re talking to.
So before you craft the perfect trend-jacking post, be sure to assess the moment for audience fit. You can do some hashtag research or use native analytics tools, but both of those options are fairly time-consuming and time is of the essence. If you want quick, comprehensive results, try social listening.
Using social listening to assess audience fit
Cultural moments generate a huge amount of messages across social. Listening is the key to tapping into those conversations for actionable insights. Think of it as a speedy alternative to a focus group.
In Sprout, Listening Topics automatically backfill 30 days worth of data—perfect for topical events and trends. Once you’ve created a Topic, you can dig into valuable demographic data and information on which profiles are driving the conversation forward. These insights can help you find intersections between your audience and the conversation at large.
The market research benefits of listening extend well-beyond demographic information. You can also use listening to validate the initial assessment of your cultural advertising opportunity. Here are some other key data points you can review once you’ve created your Listening Topic:
Volume: Look for spikes in conversation volume, then review the messages from that day to find out exactly what caused the influx of conversations.
Themes: If the culture moment sparks several conversations, use themes to categorize and identify patterns in messages.
Sentiment: Get clear on how people feel about the moment using audience sentiment data, broken down into positive, neutral and negative.
Brands who got cultural advertising right
Now you know how to audit a cultural moment for brand and audience fit, but what does that look like in practice? Let’s look to three brands that nailed cultural advertising on social media for inspiration.
Calm + Naomi Osaka
What happened: In June 2021, tennis star Naomi Osaka decided to skip press conferences at the French Open, citing mental health. In response, the organization fined her $15,000, sparking a massive outcry from fans and mental health advocates alike.
To support Osaka’s decision, meditation app Calm pledged to donate $15,000 to a French organization dedicated to promoting mental well-being through sports and physical activity. The company also offered to cover fines for any other tennis player that would like to opt out of media appearance to prioritize mental health.
Mental health is health. 🎾
To support Naomi Osaka’s decision to prioritize her mental health, Calm is donating $15,000 to @LaureusSport in France, an organization doing incredible work in the mental health space to transform the lives of young people through the power of sport. pic.twitter.com/C53ptXsks5
Why it worked: Osaka’s personal decision created major public dialogue around mental health. Athletes, celebrities and fans took to social media to defend Osaka from backlash around the move, commending her for her bravery and resilience.
I am so sad about Naomi Osaka.I truly hope she will be ok. As athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference. Good luck Naomi- we are all pulling for you!
As a mental wellness app, it’s not hard to see the connections between this cultural moment and Calm’s brand purpose. Their product and content offerings constantly underscore the importance of taking time to focus on mental health.
What makes this a truly standout cultural advertising effort is the bold action Calm promised alongside the Tweet. In an age of conscious consumerism, it showed the brand wasn’t just paying lip service to the conversation.
Aldi UK + Wordle
What happened: In a few months, Wordle went from a simple game created for personal amusement to a full-blown cultural phenomenon. From January 1 through January 31, there were more than 8.2 million mentions of Wordle on Twitter, up 9,971% from December 2021.
It didn’t take long for brands to join the conversation. Many found success mimicking the emoji grid the game generates to help people share their scores. After the game’s acquisition by the New York Times, Aldi UK jumped into the mix with a simple, effective quip on who really should’ve bought Wordle.
Should have sold Wordle to us, would have made a cracking SpecialBuy
Why it worked: If you scroll through the Aldi UK Twitter feed, you’ll find memes, jokes and sarcastic commentary on current events. The brand could have easily contributed to the conversation with an earnest ‘guess the five letter word’ post, but it wouldn’t have stayed true to the tone they’ve cultivated with their online audiences.
By choosing to lean on their brand of dry humor, they zigged where others zagged. It shows that you don’t need unlimited creative resources or a cutting-edge idea to chime in on a cultural moment. You can keep it simple and see the same returns as long as you stay true to your voice.
Squid Game + Semrush
What happened: In September 2021, Netflix hit it big. Squid Game was released and went on to become the biggest title at launch, reaching 111 million global accounts in its first 17 days on the platform. The series dominated conversations across social, increasing its popularity through word-of-mouth recommendations and, of course, memes.
Brands wanted to get in on the conversation, but the cultural moment presented a complicated dilemma for marketers. How can brands chime in on a conversation on a TV show about the pitfalls of capitalism without sounding out of touch?
Semrush, a keyword research tool, pulled it off by focusing on a fan-favorite moment in the show, rather than the show as a whole.
Why it worked: The conversations around Squid Game fell into two primary buckets: global critiques of capitalism and memes. By steering clear of the iconography associated with the overall series, Semrush’s cultural advertising effort stays playful and topical.
This proves that you don’t have to entirely ignore complicated topics. You just need to identify entry points that resonate with your audience.
Crafting a social media strategy to support cultural and social movements in 3 simple steps
Unfortunately, you can’t plan for a cultural moment. By nature, they strike at random. What you can do is create processes that streamline trend-spotting and content creation. Here’s how to get it done:
Step 1: Facilitate collaboration
Social media teams are notoriously lean. Staying on top of current events and trends while planning, creating, scheduling and reporting on content can become a quick path to burnout. That’s why it’s important to lean on your colleagues outside of social for help spotting emerging cultural moments.
Block off time to discuss things that are happening in your industry and within the culture at large. This can be done async using business messaging tools or live during team standups. You don’t need to leave every discussion with an established plan for a cultural advertising opportunity. You just need to help your coworkers become trendspotters in their own right. Soon, they’ll be looking at their social feeds as ripe sources of cultural advertising inspiration.
If you find that your colleagues have a hard time getting into brainstorm mode, try using these prompts to generate discussion:
What social trend has been making you laugh lately?
What news story is really sticking out to you right now?
Who are your favorite brands on social? What do they do that wows you?
Step 2: Practice listening
Social listening is both a tool and a skill, and skills don’t come without practice. Don’t wait until a social media movement is in full effect to get started.
Set aside time to get to know your listening tool by using it for ongoing brand research. In Sprout, you can do this by using one of our pre-built Topic Templates.
Use these templates to get to know the different data points that can be found within a Listening Topic. Once you’re ready to take things to the next level, you can try making your own custom topic.
Experiment with different keyword additions and exclusions, choose different channel sources and preview your query to see what results it yields. The more experience you have with the tool, the easier it will be to create a timely Listening Topic when you need it.
Step 3: Embrace flexibility
Participating in cultural moments can require you to deviate from an established content plan. That doesn’t mean you have to scrap your scheduled posts. It just means you need a social media calendar that supports flexibility.
Using a scheduling tool with drag-and-drop content planning features (like Sprout’s) can help you reorganize your content calendar at a moment’s notice. If the moment is causing uncertainty within your industry or the world, you may also want to consider pausing all unrelated content to avoid being perceived as insensitive.
Be ready when the moment strikes
Cultural advertising opportunities can be tricky to pull off, but with data-backed insights, any social media manager can rise to the challenge. All you need is the right processes and tools in place.
If you want to learn more about connecting the dots between your audience data, your content plan and your creative strategy, check out this social media success toolkit. Inside, you’ll find tips on creating memorable content and campaigns that are impossible to scroll past.
As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine unfolds, much of the world continues to watch via social media. In response, Russia has waged its own forces against major social media platforms and services in an attempt to control the narrative coming out of Ukraine.
In what we imagine is much to Russia's chagrin, Ukrainian and Russian civilians seem to have found their ways around such measures, and the major platforms have taken firm stances against Russian state-sponsored messages. Below, here are all the ways the internet is standing up to Russia's attacks.
Many big platforms have restricted Russia’s access in some way
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have proven invaluable in helping spread awareness of what is actually happening in Ukraine. As such, Russia has tried to control them, with little success.
On Feb. 25, Russia's communications regulator accused Facebook of censoring the accounts of four state-sponsored media sites. In response, the country moved to limit access to Facebook for its civilians.
Meta's vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a statement that Russia had asked the company to stop fact-checking and labeling posts from those four accounts, and when Meta refused, Russia chose to restrict access. Meta seems to remain staunch in its efforts to curb misinformation on its sites, and has also chosen to block Russian state media from running any ads on Facebook or to monetize in any way, according to NPR.
Google has also paused Russia's ability to profit off of content across its services. YouTube is blocking state-sponsored ads from Russian channels on its platform, and is limiting video recommendations to Russian channels while blocking them entirely in Ukraine, at the request of the Ukrainian government.
On Sunday, Alphabet, Inc. (which owns Google and YouTube) also banned downloads of the RT app in Ukrainian territory at the request of the Ukrainian government, according to Reuters. New users in Ukraine will not be able to download the Russian-owned media outlet's app, while existing users may still be able to access it but won't receive any new updates.
On Twitter, state-controlled ads have been banned since 2019, though state-sponsored media organizations like RT have accounts there. But in response to the conflict, the platform is temporarily pausing all ads in Ukraine and Russia regardless of the source, stating that it wants to "ensure critical public safety information is elevated and ads don’t detract from it."
Twitter is also being restricted in Russia according to usage metrics from internet watchdog group NetBlocks. When Mashable asked Twitter about the block, a spokesperson pointed us to a tweet stating the company's belief in "free and open access to the internet," but otherwise had no comment.
All three major platforms continue to monitor the situation in Eastern Europe and seemingly plan on taking action against any rule-violating activities. Twitter has also taken additional actions to increase security and protect the accounts of high profile journalists, activists, and government officials. According to NPR, Meta has created a special operations center to keep tabs on Russia's activity on its platforms, and YouTube has already "taken down hundreds of channels and thousands of videos in recent days for violating its policies, including rules against 'coordinated deceptive practices.'"
Online fundraising for Ukraine is active, and thriving via crypto
On Feb. 26, Ukraine’s official Twitter account said it would be accepting donations in the form of cryptocurrency. To date, more than $9.9 million has been raised in crypto for Ukraine, according toThe Verge.
The country is officially accepting donations via Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether, while decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have formed and can accept other forms of crypto donations as well. According to The Verge, Tether is supposed to pegged to the US dollar, but has been in such high demand that it is now trading above the dollar at $1.10.
People in Ukraine have also reported that their Ukrainian credit cards have stopped working, and that crypto has become the most feasible fallback.
Major crypto community players have expressed their support for Ukraine, including Russian-born creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin tweeting that the "invasion was a crime against Ukrainian and Russian people." Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian performance art group Pussy Riot, also created UkraineDAO to raise funds, and a collaboration of NFT and web3 artists created RELI3F to act as another hub for crypto donations to Ukraine.
In contrast, Russia has pushed for a total ban on cryptocurrency and continues a "head-in-the-clouds" approach to talking about the conflict on its own official Twitter account. Given that, it's unlikely Russia will be soliciting a similar amount of donations via crypto any time soon.
Ukrainian and Russian civilians have found ways to communicate
Telegram is the most popular messenger in Ukraine, and while many believe it to be protected, rival app Signal's founder Moxie Marlinspike tweeted a thread explaining Telegram's cloud-based nature, detailing the possible threat from Russia.
While this doesn't guarantee a mass Ukrainian exodus from the potentially jeopardized app, the thread brings awareness to alternatives, as well as a feature within Telegram called "secret messages," that would provide more privacy and security for those who remain on the service.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare also saw a massive spike in Signal usage just after midnight on Feb. 24, approximately the same time that the Russian invasion began. Signal's messaging services promise end to end encryption, and is generally agreed upon by cybersecurity experts to be the most secure private messaging app.
To prepare for potential internet outages, many are also working to get around online censorship in Ukraine or Russia.
Yev Muchnik, a Ukraine-born lawyer who’s lived in the U.S. since 1988, told The Verge that he has been working with developers from PieFi and Ukraine United DAO to combat any attacks on internet access. Their goal is to "create peer-to-peer mesh networks to preserve internet connectivity, even if centralized internet service providers go down." Privacy-preserving internet browsing service Tor also tweeted out an extensive thread detailing how private citizens can protect themselves against surveillance and censorship.
On-the-ground info continues to spread online, albeit with misinfo concerns
As people across the internet continue to seek out information, other social platforms like TikTok have offered a view of what is actually happening on the ground in Ukraine. Even before the official invasion in the early hours of Feb. 24, TikTok videos had been showing Russian military weapons and vehicles en route to Ukrainian borders, alerting military analysts and civilians alike to the upcoming threat.
As the invasion began in earnest, more social posts have cropped up purporting to highlight the true day-to-day life in Ukraine and Russia right now.
Independent Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov has used Instagram to document photos and videos of his account of Russia's actions in Ukraine. Russian TikTokker Niki Proshin posted a video showing an anti-war protest in Russia. According to The Guardian, Ukrainian influencer Anna Prytula's Instagram (which has now been made private) showed footage of missiles attacking in Ukraine.
But even as Ukrainian and Russian residents are publishing real-time, truthful videos, fake war pages and accounts on platforms like Instagram and TikTok have also taken the opportunity to reel in views and followers.
Instagram has taken action by removing scam war pages for violating its community guidelines regarding inauthentic behavior, while TikTok told Business Insider, "We continue to closely monitor the situation, with increased resources to respond to emerging trends and remove violative content, including harmful misinformation and promotion of violence. We also partner with independent fact-checking organizations to further aid our efforts to help TikTok remain a safe and authentic place."
While the platforms are presumably working to take down blatant misinformation, journalists like those at CNN are also actively fact-checking viral videos in order to ensure that any first person accounts from Russian military action is accurate.
Learn more about what this tool is, how it can help small business owners, and how you can use it to optimize your marketing campaigns by catching up on how Ubersuggest has evolved over the years.
What Is Ubersuggest?
Ubersuggest is an easy-to-use SEO tool that can help you gain more insight into trends and strategies that are working in your market—so you can adopt them, improve on them, and use them to gain a competitive edge.
Ubersuggest gives you a lot of value with its free plan compared to other SEO tools. To get even more valuable insights you can leverage for your website, upgrading to one of the affordable paid plans can be done at any time.
Who Is Ubersuggest Best Suited For?
Ubersuggest is an all-around SEO tool that’s useful for a wide variety of users. It’s especially helpful for solopreneurs, small business owners, and small agencies managing SEO for multiple clients.
SEO is one of the best ways to increase website traffic and position your business for long-term success. A tool like Ubersuggest can help you take advantage of the many tactics and strategies websites use everyday to grow their online presence.
What Problems Does Ubersuggest Solve?
Ubersuggest helps small business owners understand and implement strategies to grow their business online.
The tool offers various features which help new—and seasoned—marketers understand what the competition is doing and, more importantly, how they can do it better.
After all, the average CTR drops from 34 percent to 17 percent when you go from the top to just the second spot in Google—so it’s important have a proper handle on your SEO so you can snag the top spot high-intent search terms in your industry.
If you’re a business owner who is not very marketing or SEO-savvy, tools like Ubersuggest will help simplify and automate your marketing and SEO-related tasks.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, knowing where you should focus can feel like a daunting task. However, once you have learned the basics, you will see the powerful results a comprehensive SEO strategy can have on your revenue and business growth.
What Outcomes Are Ubersuggest Users Looking For?
When using Ubersuggest, customers are typically looking for the following outcomes:
They want more (profitable) traffic to their website.
They want to rank higher on Google.
They need to find the right keywords to write content about.
There are many key metrics that can drive business growth which you should be looking at. SEO tools are a great way to get more insight into them.
How to Use Ubersuggest
There are many ways you can Ubersuggest to improve your strategy and its versatility is only limited by your imagination.
In case you’re still new to the world of SEO and need some help getting started, we have you covered! Here are some ways you can take advantage of Ubersuggest:
Run SEO site audits for technical SEO feedback: An Semrush study found 42.5 percent of websites have broken links. Regular SEO audits can identify mistakes like this. Improving your SEO strategy includes performing regular SEO audits to see if everything is in order. That way, you can fix the SEO problems before it starts having an impact on your traffic and customers.
Find profitable keywords for your business: A huge part of any SEO strategy includes finding relevant keywords that connect with your audience. For example, 98.1 percent of Google searches are long-tail keywords; how can you identify these without a good SEO tool for keyword research? Ubersuggest helps you find the best keywords and come up with ways to effectively use them to improve content rankings and grow your organic traffic.
Find content ideas that have a track record of user interest: Finding the best keywords alone isn’t enough for long-term business success, and overusing them can be viewed as spam. To capture the attention of your target audience, you need to write interesting content that appeals to them.
Discover backlink opportunities based on who’s linking to your competitor’s websites and not yours: Posts that are ranked #1 on Google have an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than the posts in positions two through ten. Doing some competitor analysis can unlock a lot of backlink opportunities that can lead to more website traffic and better connecting with your target audience.
Seeing how your competitors approach their SEO is a great way to find areas of improvement for your own site which Ubersuggest can help you with.
How Ubersuggest Has Evolved Over Time
Ubersuggest has undergone a lot of changes over the years. From adding SEO research tools to improving functionality, let’s explore the range of Ubersuggest updates that’ll help you boost your business online.
Here’s a list of all the Ubersuggest updates over the last few years.
Ubersuggest Update 2.0
This Ubersuggest update was heavily focused on keyword research, providing an overview, keyword ideas, and SERP analysis.
The graph in the first section shows how the search volume changes over time.
Here’s an example:
This graph will show you whether the keyword is rising or falling in popularity or if it has seasonality.
The tool also breaks down the cost-per-click, the SEO difficulty, and the paid difficulty.
The difficulty scores range from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the more difficult it will be to compete for the keyword. On the other hand, the lower your score, the easier it is to rank for that keyword.
There are three sections in the new traffic analyzer: overview, top pages, and keywords. The first section gives some basic stats and a graph showing the traffic to the domain.
There is information about how many keywords a domain ranks for, how much search traffic comes from that region, how many paid keywords a site bids on, and how much they spend on Google Ads.
Another part of the traffic analyzer displays the most popular pages within a domain.
You will see the title and URL of each page, the number of visits that page receives from Google on a monthly basis, and how many times the URL has been shared on social media.
Last but not least, this Ubersuggest update introduced a top keywords section. You can find all of the organic and paid keywords a site is targeting, whether you put in your own domain or a competitors.
If you click “content ideas” in the navigational menu or click “view all content ideas”, you will be directed to a page that lists all blog posts written with your target keyword or phrase in mind.
Posts with the most social shares are shown at the top of the list.
Moreover, the Ubersuggest update created a filtering system that makes it easy to fine-tune your search by including certain keywords or excluding others and even putting minimum and maximum thresholds on social shares.
The update added a “related” tab on Ubersuggest for finding additional relevant keywords. It also enabled you to export all of the keywords via CSV.
Another important addition was local keyword research. The new tool lets users search for keyword ideas and stats by city, county, region, or country.
In addition, if you use the “keyword ideas” report, you’ll also notice that the SERP results, which display all sites that rank for that term, have been changed to include rankings for sites within that region.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
Ubersuggest Update 6.0
Ubersuggest update 6.0 added a handy, easy-to-use dashboard feature so even users with little to no knowledge of SEO can work with the tool effectively.
You can see your SEO errors that need to be fixed, link growth (or decline), monthly search traffic, and overall search rankings in the dashboard.
To make things easier, you don’t have to worry about staying up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes—since it crawls your website for you every week.
Furthermore, the search rankings feature allows you to monitor any changes in your rankings on a daily basis.
The coolest part is you can track your ranking in any country, city, or region. That way, you can see rankings of both local and international SEO campaigns.
Finally, Ubersuggest has a date selector, so you can see a nice chart of your rankings over time once you’ve used the tool for a while.
So far so good? It gets better!
Ubersuggest Update 7.0
Ubersuggest update 7.0 brought about a lot of changes, particularly around link data and traffic estimations.
The biggest change is now you can what percentage of searches take place on desktop versus mobile devices for any given keyword.
The term “marketing” for example reveals that desktop devices are dominating the searches (see below).
This Ubersuggest update also improved the backlink data. The backlinks and referring domains of a site can now be tracked over time to see if they are growing or declining.
Additionally, the tool also lists the number of new and lost links for a given site on a daily basis.
Ubersuggest Update 8.0
Ubersuggest update 8.0 truly leveled up with competitor analysis. Now users can see a table with detailed competitor data.
This tool displays the competitor domain, the number of keywords you both rank for, their estimated traffic, the number of backlinks your website has, and keyword gaps (the keywords they rank for but you don’t—this is your chance to step up the game).
This update is extremely useful for business owners who want to know their competition better and improve their strategy to match or even surpass other players in the field.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ubersuggest Updates
How can Ubersuggest help me?
Ubersuggest offers many free and paid features to help small businesses and solopreneurs beat their competition at SEO and content marketing. The site offers tools to improve your website’s searchability and presence in search results by helping you tackle the 4 key pillars of SEO:
Having a healthy website from a technical and UX perspective.
Focusing on the right keywords to drive traffic and conversions on your site.
Creating content for those keywords that will be shareable and valuable to readers.
Driving backlinks to your site to increase domain authority and drive more organic traffic.
How much does Ubersuggest cost?
Ubersuggest is partly free, but paid plans start at $12/month for individuals, $20/month for small and medium-sized businesses, and $40/month for large businesses and agencies.
Do I have to sign a long-term contract?
No. Ubersuggest customers pay month-to-month with no contracts. You can cancel at any time. Plus, everyone gets a 7-day free trial to test the platform.
How is it better than the other SEO tools out there?
There are many free and paid SEO tools out there. Ubersuggest is one of the best because it’s easy to use, offers less expensive paid features, and is geared toward small businesses who may or may not have marketing experience.
Conclusion: Why You Should Use Ubersuggest
You can’t do everything in digital marketing on your own. If you want better, faster results, you need dependable, effective tools to step up your marketing game.
Ubersuggest has evolved a lot over time to improve how you plan your keyword research, analyze the competition, get relevant content ideas, view historical backlink data, study traffic trends, and improve your digital marketing strategy.
The change doesn’t stop here.
Ubersuggest will continue to make updates to make the platform better and improve how businesses approach their SEO strategy.
What is your favorite Ubersuggest feature so far?
from Neil Patel's Digital Marketing Blog https://ift.tt/iA7en3v
via IFTTT
Learn more about what this tool is, how it can help small business owners, and how you can use it to optimize your marketing campaigns by catching up on how Ubersuggest has evolved over the years.
What Is Ubersuggest?
Ubersuggest is an easy-to-use SEO tool that can help you gain more insight into trends and strategies that are working in your market—so you can adopt them, improve on them, and use them to gain a competitive edge.
Ubersuggest gives you a lot of value with its free plan compared to other SEO tools. To get even more valuable insights you can leverage for your website, upgrading to one of the affordable paid plans can be done at any time.
Who Is Ubersuggest Best Suited For?
Ubersuggest is an all-around SEO tool that’s useful for a wide variety of users. It’s especially helpful for solopreneurs, small business owners, and small agencies managing SEO for multiple clients.
SEO is one of the best ways to increase website traffic and position your business for long-term success. A tool like Ubersuggest can help you take advantage of the many tactics and strategies websites use everyday to grow their online presence.
What Problems Does Ubersuggest Solve?
Ubersuggest helps small business owners understand and implement strategies to grow their business online.
The tool offers various features which help new—and seasoned—marketers understand what the competition is doing and, more importantly, how they can do it better.
After all, the average CTR drops from 34 percent to 17 percent when you go from the top to just the second spot in Google—so it’s important have a proper handle on your SEO so you can snag the top spot high-intent search terms in your industry.
If you’re a business owner who is not very marketing or SEO-savvy, tools like Ubersuggest will help simplify and automate your marketing and SEO-related tasks.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, knowing where you should focus can feel like a daunting task. However, once you have learned the basics, you will see the powerful results a comprehensive SEO strategy can have on your revenue and business growth.
What Outcomes Are Ubersuggest Users Looking For?
When using Ubersuggest, customers are typically looking for the following outcomes:
They want more (profitable) traffic to their website.
They want to rank higher on Google.
They need to find the right keywords to write content about.
There are many key metrics that can drive business growth which you should be looking at. SEO tools are a great way to get more insight into them.
How to Use Ubersuggest
There are many ways you can Ubersuggest to improve your strategy and its versatility is only limited by your imagination.
In case you’re still new to the world of SEO and need some help getting started, we have you covered! Here are some ways you can take advantage of Ubersuggest:
Run SEO site audits for technical SEO feedback: An Semrush study found 42.5 percent of websites have broken links. Regular SEO audits can identify mistakes like this. Improving your SEO strategy includes performing regular SEO audits to see if everything is in order. That way, you can fix the SEO problems before it starts having an impact on your traffic and customers.
Find profitable keywords for your business: A huge part of any SEO strategy includes finding relevant keywords that connect with your audience. For example, 98.1 percent of Google searches are long-tail keywords; how can you identify these without a good SEO tool for keyword research? Ubersuggest helps you find the best keywords and come up with ways to effectively use them to improve content rankings and grow your organic traffic.
Find content ideas that have a track record of user interest: Finding the best keywords alone isn’t enough for long-term business success, and overusing them can be viewed as spam. To capture the attention of your target audience, you need to write interesting content that appeals to them.
Discover backlink opportunities based on who’s linking to your competitor’s websites and not yours: Posts that are ranked #1 on Google have an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than the posts in positions two through ten. Doing some competitor analysis can unlock a lot of backlink opportunities that can lead to more website traffic and better connecting with your target audience.
Seeing how your competitors approach their SEO is a great way to find areas of improvement for your own site which Ubersuggest can help you with.
How Ubersuggest Has Evolved Over Time
Ubersuggest has undergone a lot of changes over the years. From adding SEO research tools to improving functionality, let’s explore the range of Ubersuggest updates that’ll help you boost your business online.
Here’s a list of all the Ubersuggest updates over the last few years.
Ubersuggest Update 2.0
This Ubersuggest update was heavily focused on keyword research, providing an overview, keyword ideas, and SERP analysis.
The graph in the first section shows how the search volume changes over time.
Here’s an example:
This graph will show you whether the keyword is rising or falling in popularity or if it has seasonality.
The tool also breaks down the cost-per-click, the SEO difficulty, and the paid difficulty.
The difficulty scores range from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the more difficult it will be to compete for the keyword. On the other hand, the lower your score, the easier it is to rank for that keyword.
There are three sections in the new traffic analyzer: overview, top pages, and keywords. The first section gives some basic stats and a graph showing the traffic to the domain.
There is information about how many keywords a domain ranks for, how much search traffic comes from that region, how many paid keywords a site bids on, and how much they spend on Google Ads.
Another part of the traffic analyzer displays the most popular pages within a domain.
You will see the title and URL of each page, the number of visits that page receives from Google on a monthly basis, and how many times the URL has been shared on social media.
Last but not least, this Ubersuggest update introduced a top keywords section. You can find all of the organic and paid keywords a site is targeting, whether you put in your own domain or a competitors.
If you click “content ideas” in the navigational menu or click “view all content ideas”, you will be directed to a page that lists all blog posts written with your target keyword or phrase in mind.
Posts with the most social shares are shown at the top of the list.
Moreover, the Ubersuggest update created a filtering system that makes it easy to fine-tune your search by including certain keywords or excluding others and even putting minimum and maximum thresholds on social shares.
The update added a “related” tab on Ubersuggest for finding additional relevant keywords. It also enabled you to export all of the keywords via CSV.
Another important addition was local keyword research. The new tool lets users search for keyword ideas and stats by city, county, region, or country.
In addition, if you use the “keyword ideas” report, you’ll also notice that the SERP results, which display all sites that rank for that term, have been changed to include rankings for sites within that region.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
Ubersuggest Update 6.0
Ubersuggest update 6.0 added a handy, easy-to-use dashboard feature so even users with little to no knowledge of SEO can work with the tool effectively.
You can see your SEO errors that need to be fixed, link growth (or decline), monthly search traffic, and overall search rankings in the dashboard.
To make things easier, you don’t have to worry about staying up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes—since it crawls your website for you every week.
Furthermore, the search rankings feature allows you to monitor any changes in your rankings on a daily basis.
The coolest part is you can track your ranking in any country, city, or region. That way, you can see rankings of both local and international SEO campaigns.
Finally, Ubersuggest has a date selector, so you can see a nice chart of your rankings over time once you’ve used the tool for a while.
So far so good? It gets better!
Ubersuggest Update 7.0
Ubersuggest update 7.0 brought about a lot of changes, particularly around link data and traffic estimations.
The biggest change is now you can what percentage of searches take place on desktop versus mobile devices for any given keyword.
The term “marketing” for example reveals that desktop devices are dominating the searches (see below).
This Ubersuggest update also improved the backlink data. The backlinks and referring domains of a site can now be tracked over time to see if they are growing or declining.
Additionally, the tool also lists the number of new and lost links for a given site on a daily basis.
Ubersuggest Update 8.0
Ubersuggest update 8.0 truly leveled up with competitor analysis. Now users can see a table with detailed competitor data.
This tool displays the competitor domain, the number of keywords you both rank for, their estimated traffic, the number of backlinks your website has, and keyword gaps (the keywords they rank for but you don’t—this is your chance to step up the game).
This update is extremely useful for business owners who want to know their competition better and improve their strategy to match or even surpass other players in the field.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ubersuggest Updates
How can Ubersuggest help me?
Ubersuggest offers many free and paid features to help small businesses and solopreneurs beat their competition at SEO and content marketing. The site offers tools to improve your website’s searchability and presence in search results by helping you tackle the 4 key pillars of SEO:
Having a healthy website from a technical and UX perspective.
Focusing on the right keywords to drive traffic and conversions on your site.
Creating content for those keywords that will be shareable and valuable to readers.
Driving backlinks to your site to increase domain authority and drive more organic traffic.
How much does Ubersuggest cost?
Ubersuggest is partly free, but paid plans start at $12/month for individuals, $20/month for small and medium-sized businesses, and $40/month for large businesses and agencies.
Do I have to sign a long-term contract?
No. Ubersuggest customers pay month-to-month with no contracts. You can cancel at any time. Plus, everyone gets a 7-day free trial to test the platform.
How is it better than the other SEO tools out there?
There are many free and paid SEO tools out there. Ubersuggest is one of the best because it’s easy to use, offers less expensive paid features, and is geared toward small businesses who may or may not have marketing experience.
Conclusion: Why You Should Use Ubersuggest
You can’t do everything in digital marketing on your own. If you want better, faster results, you need dependable, effective tools to step up your marketing game.
Ubersuggest has evolved a lot over time to improve how you plan your keyword research, analyze the competition, get relevant content ideas, view historical backlink data, study traffic trends, and improve your digital marketing strategy.
The change doesn’t stop here.
Ubersuggest will continue to make updates to make the platform better and improve how businesses approach their SEO strategy.
What is your favorite Ubersuggest feature so far?
from Neil Patel's Digital Marketing Blog https://ift.tt/C6wmO5a
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If you can believe it, Tumblr turned 15 this month. The microblogging site that launched a thousand ships was created by software consultant David Karp in 2007. During a time when longer-form blogging on platforms like Blogger and WordPress dominated, Tumblr offered a short-form, multimedia-rich experience that drew in millions. By 2013, the site was acquired by Yahoo for more than $1 billion, in what some saw as a gamble. "Tumblr is redefining creative expression online," then Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, calling it "the internet's fastest-growing media frenzy." A press release promised "not to screw it up."
Somehow, they did, and Tumblr has never recovered.
As someone who drank in Tumblr’s ambrosia from 2010 to 2015, it’s pained me to watch its prospects dry up. A recent New Yorker piece called it "popular for being obsolete." And while I know Tumblr users don't give a damn about relevance, I still believe in Tumblr and the possibility it holds for a new generation. I spoke with former employees and users to understand how a whirlwind of acquisitions, integrations, and wasted energy left Tumblr wading in a pool of uncertainty — and how the site so many loved might find itself again.
David Karp at Tumblr HQ in February 2012.Credit: DON EMMERT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A brief history of Tumblr's acquisitions
Jack Christian (his name has been changed at his request for anonymity) joined Tumblr’s engineering team just after the Yahoo acquisition. Internal sentiment around the acquisition was initially positive and "culturally, it wasn't a bad fit," but Karp's nimble fingers had built Tumblr on a foundation too small and shaky to support millions of blogs.
As the team began rebuilding for scale, Yahoo leadership "were really pushing us to get on a lot of their systems and integrate more tightly without really understanding why we built things a certain way [to be] Tumblr-specific around our legacy model. We spent a lot of time working on [integration] instead of thinking about what could really benefit the users," says Christian. And while Tumblr tinkered, competitors like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook developed new front-end features to draw users in.
The Tumblr team began to see the first instances of what would soon become a pattern: leadership's push for flashy gains that betrayed a crucial misunderstanding that what makes Tumblr unique are the online communities it fosters.
Tumblr.com homepage on March 6, 2007, less than a month after the site's launch.Credit: WayBack Machine
By 2016, Yahoo slashed Tumblr's value by more than half, citing its failure to meet sales goals. In 2017, Verizon Media acquired Yahoo, Meyer stepped down, and COO Jeff D'Onofrio replaced Karp as Tumblr's CEO. A year later, Isabella Kahle joined Tumblr as a product marketing manager on a marketing team that was weathering the storm of all that change. "We were severely under-appreciated, understaffed, underfunded," she sighs, "and lacked a lot of tools that could have made our work great and potentially grown the business."
In August 2019, Tumblr was acquired again, this time by WordPress owner Automattic for a paltry $3 million.
We were severely under-appreciated, understaffed, underfunded, and lacked a lot of tools that could have made our work great and potentially grown the business.
"It seemed like a really good move in terms of a fit for Tumblr at the time," says Christian, "although very quickly, I felt quite the opposite." Automattic "didn't really understand the value of Tumblr," seeing it as just "another space where people go to blog." Like Yahoo, Automattic clumsily shoehorned Tumblr into its existing infrastructure. "Early on, they were talking about 'why can't we just run Tumblr on WordPress? It's less work,' without understanding the nuances [of the platform]. There were a lot of opinionated people very high up in leadership guiding a lot of our decisions and strategy without understanding the user journey and impact that we could have in certain areas of growth. It was kind of just all whimsical. [We] wasted engineering time trying to integrate for no benefit to the user whatsoever."
Both Christian and Kahle left Tumblr in 2021 and, by that time, Kahle said she had a "gut feeling…that Automattic had kind of given up on Tumblr. The vibe that I got from listening to executives speak about Tumblr [was that] I think they have a mental deadline of when they want Tumblr to prove itself. And that timeline is not feasible based on the team's bandwidth and support and funding." Tumblr wouldn't shut down, but would be put "on autopilot" she predicts, to be kept running without any future development.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg calls the claim "untrue," citing his own full-time involvement in the brand as further proof of Tumblr’s value to the company. Since the sudden departure of D’Onofrio in January 2022, Mullenweg has stepped in to oversee Tumblr. "We haven't gotten the results in the past two years that we [had] hoped for," he tells Mashable. His first priority is growth, to "make the product great so that people use it more [and] tell their friends."
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, is now managing Tumblr full-time.Credit: Sportsfile/Corbis/Sportsfile via Getty Images
A product in need of direction
When Christian joined Tumblr in 2013, a formal product team was just beginning to take shape. Plagued by constant churn, a phenomenon that permeated the entire company, the team never reached its final form. He eventually moved from engineering to product, losing track of how many product leaders he saw come and go. "They all came in with their own opinions of how they wanted to run things without any context of Tumblr's history or background or data."
Leadership busied themselves with "trying to figure out what the next thing for Tumblr could be," but they "never really took a critical look at what it would take for that feature to improve the community and the platform as a whole," Christian says. They missed opportunities to pull in the marketing and community teams, people who were close to the users, who might not only identify how to evolve the product, but also "help the public understand why Tumblr is great, why it should be here, and why it's cool." Long-time employees and folks like Christian, who had been using Tumblr for five years by the time he was hired, "felt like we knew what we needed to do to help the community and help the product grow. But it was difficult to have a voice in a place where the loudest people had the least amount of context."
Credit: WayBack Machine
It was not for lack of trying. After observing that users would purposely delete posts after a set number of hours, Christian suggested the site offer an "ephemeral post" that could be scheduled to disappear. As he watched Giphy scrape the site's API to populate its own database with GIFs ripped directly from Tumblr users, he suggested the company lean into the format as one of platform's undeniable "strategic advantages." He also floated the idea of bringing back an early feature called Tumblr crushes that showed a user the nine blogs they'd liked the most posts from and fostered a sense of community and closeness.
It was difficult to have a voice in a place where the loudest people had the least amount of context.
None of these ideas saw the light of day. It didn't matter how much support he had from the marketing, data, or engineering teams, "the product direction was essentially led by whoever was in charge that day." And many of those people were not native Tumblr users or long-time Tumblr employees, which meant they pushed to fulfill flashier, short-term priorities that "shifted every three months" and weren't rooted in what the platform truly needed.
What they did pursue in the name of remaining competitive felt like spinning their wheels, resulting in "really talented and passionate people doing a great job, but just not working on the right thing."
Tumblr's revolving door
By the time Tumblr arrived at Automattic, Christian says "all the changes from Yahoo and Verizon kind of broke down the culture and made people less excited about being there." It seemed the most constant element of working at Tumblr was the perpetually revolving door of hires.
Christian and Kahle attribute these departures to a toxic cocktail of frustrations: lack of upward movement for anyone director-level and above, shifts in leadership across acquisitions that made people feel professionally untethered, and the constant poaching of talent by companies with better compensation and more interesting projects. Tumblr was like a snake eating itself: It was common for employees to experience burnout after taking on the additional workloads of former teammates.
When asked about the lack of upward movement, Mullenweg says, "Nothing else matters for Tumblr unless we get people using it more. If it's growing, there's lots of opportunities for upward movement and new roles [within the company]."
Tumblr was like a snake eating itself: It was common for employees to experience burnout after taking on the additional workloads of former teammates.
Amanda Brennan worked on Tumblr's marketing team for seven years, and left her role as head of editorial in March 2021, 19 months into the Automattic acquisition. "I felt like I couldn't fight anymore because no one would listen. I have been saying this until I'm blue in the face and I'm not seeing the feedback from leadership that I was hoping for… If I couldn't move the needle, who could? What was next for me involved more investment than leadership at the time was willing to commit. And that [was] investment in Tumblr as a culture platform."
Christian explains that, across acquisitions, "There was quite a bit of top-down direction...focusing on features and business. We didn't spend a lot of time doing deep analysis of why people come to Tumblr and why they stay. It wasn't a core part of our strategy. There was just a lack of understanding."
Kahle agrees, "It really comes down to leadership not understanding the platform and its needs." She believes D'Onofrio "really did care about the users." While he tried to steer Tumblr as a business, he also worked to "maintain David Karp's original vision" and nurtured a relationship with the founder. "When we were acquired by Automattic, Karp [visited] the office and was excited for the future, to move things forward and see what we could accomplish," Kahle says, adding glumly, "I don't think we accomplished much."
According to both Mullenweg and Kahle, Tumblr is roughly a 200-person organization. In 2021, 53 employees who had been with Tumblr pre-acquisition left the company. Mullenweg estimates that 75 percent of the current team have been hired post-acquisition, with an uptick in hires in just the past few months. "I hope it's really clear that I'm incredibly excited about Tumblr," he tells Mashable. "I care about it deeply. And that's reflected throughout the entire current team."
The point of no return
"Our users are very opinionated, vocal, and passionate," explains Kahle. During her tenure, users simultaneously adored the platform while being resistant to changes that could save it, and "there were very few product updates that we rolled out that were not received poorly." Though she sympathizes — "any time Instagram redesigns their homepage I'm annoyed, too" — Tumblr users wouldn't let go. "A year later, we'd still get comments from users being like, 'literally no one asked for this stop changing things' or 'we want porn back.'"
The porn ban of 2018 was a defining event for Tumblr that led to a 30 percent drop in traffic and a mass exodus of users that blindsided the company.
"Tumblr has always been extremely vigilant about abusers online," says Christian. A trust and safety team of 20 maintained a physical wall in the office where they'd pin the information of users they had reported to authorities. Kahle calls them "the best team at Tumblr. They work incredibly hard, really closely with the FBI… We had a great team that was also working with human rights groups on the Hill." Both Christian and Kahle say that the teams' work inspired similar approaches at Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. Though, "to be fair," Kahle notes "some of our employees left and went to those platforms."
In November 2018, when Apple removed Tumblr from its App Store citing the presence of child pornography on the app, Tumblr panicked. Christian had "created a proposal that would allow [Tumblr] to be viable with [Apple and] Verizon's policies without having to do a complete ban on anything controversial." Instead, the fix they moved forward with was "a huge sledge hammer on a problem that was kind of specific. It was larger than a porn ban, it was [a ban on] explicit content based on whatever the computer algorithm decides."
Tumblr has historically struggled to monetize effectively, and Christian recalls that in addition to being a legal and public relations nightmare, porn on the platform was a financial death knell. "We were told that we can't make money if we have any explicit content on our site, that specifically advertisers that will give us a substantial amount of money to keep things running will not come here."
It's a head-scratching sentiment considering that, at the time of the ban, company leadership had failed to grasp what made the platform valuable for more than five years. Wooing advertisers is putting lipstick on a pig. The heart of the problem is "how do you foster a platform with a solid business perspective, that's this place where people figure out who they are and pour out all of these deep, vulnerable emotions?" asks Brennan. "You're not going to monetize it in the same way that you monetize [WordPress, which is] a blank canvas for people to build a website for their thing that they already know about. Tumblr is the exploration, Tumblr is where you do the deep digging, and that's hard to monetize."
The Creatr economy
The porn ban was a major blow to Tumblr, which had already been bleeding out in the battle against user churn. In 2014, at least 84 million posts were published every day. By 2018, that number had dropped to 30 million. The platform was especially hard for new users to navigate and, crucially, lacked a "stickiness" Christian says would have unlocked retention. When a new user posts, "it doesn't show up on [other] people's dashboards or explore pages. They're not getting any sort of engagement," Kahle explains. [That leads them] to churn more quickly, within their first 10 days." Christian says, "I think we failed to support the user journey [and dig into] what it means to be happy on the platform, what it means to have a great experience when you join for the first time.”
Tumblr has also failed to modernize, even in the simplest ways. "There's a lot of complexity to and a history of weird features — like asks and submissions — that haven't been really updated in a long, long time." For example, he points to Tumblr's Answer Time, where fans submit questions for a celebrity to answer. The delay between submission and reply can be days, even weeks. Christian says making it live and interactive, and then potentially letting users host their own answer times, are no-brainer improvements.
Tumblr is the exploration, Tumblr is where you do the deep digging, and that's hard to monetize.
The platform also needs to nurture its creators. Christian says research found that only a "small segment of people were highly engaged in posting and replying." The majority of users engaged in "passive consumption." That means that if the blogs you follow stop posting, your dashboard is dead. Having engaged creators is vital to Tumblr's survival, but there are very few financial incentives for them, especially compared to YouTube's industry-leading revenue split and Instagram's native shopping tools.
Post+, a recent first step toward paywalled content to the platform, was met with disdain and frustration. Although the feature was completely optional, users protested that monetizing fan-created works negated the fair use of copyrighted characters and stories and put creators at risk of legal action. Post+ was a beta test, but "I think that users thought it meant that the entire platform would eventually become sort of like subscription-based," says Kahle.
That reaction highlighted a fundamental imbalance in expectations. "Across Tumblr there is still this widespread mentality that content should be free," says Kahle. "My challenge as a marketer was trying to convince our users that our creators deserve to be recognized and compensated for the work that they're putting out there. "The platform recently launched a tip jar feature that Kahle says "many employees really fought for," but the platform still has strides to make towards satisfying creator needs for on-platform monetization.
Where does Tumblr go from here?
For Tumblr's 15th anniversary, Mashable has been publishing a series of pieces about the platform's legacy. "Every article is saying how Tumblr's dead or dying and it's not," Mullenweg assures me, adding, "It's kind of getting better than ever." Then he reads me a positive comment from a user, and later sends me an email with 15 more. They convince me that the user experience on Tumblr is getting better, with fewer bugs, bots, and broken features. But to be better than ever, Tumblr would need to re-cultivate its singular charm.
I spoke to a handful of former users, all active from between 2010 and 2016. For them, Tumblr was a glorious archive of their growth and discovery. In its heyday, the platform was a haven for teenagers craving information and meaning, and people searching for themselves.
Dimitra Zuccarelli says her Tumblr is a record of her search for her identity: "It's basically just research [on who you are]. You're picking and choosing what you like and forming this aesthetic. You could literally craft an identity every time you started a new blog." Zuccarelli never went by her real name, and created blogs dedicated to the skater lifestyle aesthetic, fashion ("a lot of pictures of the Olsen twins"), street photography, Christmas content, and one solely filled with "really depressing GIFs."
That discovery was almost entirely manual, made possible by the all-consuming, boundless energy of adolescence without any algorithmic design. "We are in this place in culture, where so many people expect algorithmic understanding," says Brennan. Tumblr might be the place for you to go out and find yourself, but "TikTok basically comes to you," says Zuccarelli, because the algorithm "knows everything about you." To compete in the recommendation algorithm arena, Tumblr would need to ask its users for more information about who they are and what they like, something it historically has rebuked in favor of anonymity.
The key is to look at Tumblr as a creative culture platform versus a tech platform.
At the time of publishing, Tumblr reports that there are 9.4 million daily posts on the platform, compared to 84 million in 2014. But with the rise of ‘90s and early 2000s nostalgia among Gen Z, a revival of the platform seems possible. In January, D'Onofrio said that half of the platform's active users and 71 percent of its new users are Gen Z. Kahle who, at 25, is a zillennial, says attracting Gen Z and getting them to stay "may come down to the product." For example, Kahle says "if Gen Z's attention span is whatever percent shorter than millennials' then the recommendation algorithm needs to be used to churn out content way faster."
But the core of the Tumblr experience, for any age group, is community.
According to Brennan, "the key is to look at Tumblr as a creative culture platform versus a tech platform. People don't come to Tumblr because the features are groundbreaking." Automattic can't treat Tumblr like WordPress. "WordPress is a utility, it's easy to use, it gets you up and running," she notes. If Facebook is a phonebook where "you go to connect with people you like, find a handyman, pick an event," and Twitter is a call-in radio show where "you hear all these different opinions, but you can shoot back," then Tumblr is a high school cafeteria. Aesthetics, normies, weird art kids, goths, and musicians all have their place, Brennan says, "and you can be anything you want to be. Sometimes you don't fit into one so you try another. There's eavesdropping. You're always going to learn something, no matter where you are."
"That is so much magic," Brennan gushes. "Some of the stuff that happens on Tumblr is not happening anywhere else on the internet… It is never going to be for everyone, and I think that's OK." In the end, she says, "Tumblr thrives in spite of itself."
