From “less fuss and more stuff”
to “Join over 100 million people”

The February 2007 capture is the oldest homepage we found, and it is tiny. A blue lowercase wordmark with a full stop, tumblr., sits next to a gray flower. Below it, in a serif font, the page defines its own word before it uses it. The links are blue and underlined. A heading in small capitals, Featured Tumblelogs, sits over a strip of three small page previews.

WIRED dates Tumblr’s launch to February 2007, with the tagline Blogging made easy (reported).^[1] That line isn’t on this capture. According to the same story, David Karp and Marco Arment had built the first version at the end of 2006, during a two-week break between consulting contracts, and 75,000 people created blogs within the first two weeks.^[1]

Scroll to the bottom of the card. The copyright line reads Copyright © 2007 Davidville, Inc. The company named there isn’t Tumblr. By the next capture it is.

By November 2008 the flower is gone. The wordmark is big, white and rounded, and it keeps its full stop. The page is dark blue. A white panel holds a sign-up form headed Create your tumblelog, with a smaller line under it, And never look back., and a button that says Start posting →.

The top half of that panel is empty in our still. In the page’s code the space is a box called featured_tumblelogs, 600 by 250 pixels, filled by a Flash file named slideshow.swf. The small strip of featured previews from 2007 had become a slideshow. The archived copy doesn’t play it, and the capture tool hid the leftover player, so the space is white.

The text on the left calls tumblelogs the easiest way to express yourself and says what you can post: text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. The copyright line now says © Tumblr, Inc.

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In June 2009 the headline is a slogan in big dark green letters on a lime box: The easiest way to blog. Under it, Post anything. Customize everything. Below the box runs a column headed Popular Stuff from the Tumblr network, a sample of posts with their note counts.

One says I won Keyboard Cat on eBay yesterday. Another quotes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and a photo of a wall of Polaroids has 956 notes.

The right column shows what the logged-out crawler got as a dashboard: Following 0 people, Liked 0 posts and a login box headed Please log in. Four months earlier Tumblr had made Tumblerette, an iPhone app from the studio Mobelux, its official free app.^[2]

By February 2010 Tumblr’s homepage has dropped the posts. The page is one sign-up form on a blue gradient, under the same slogan in white. A green strip on top of the form says See 24 reasons why you'll love Tumblr →, and the button says Sign up and start posting! The code still carries a style fix that only Internet Explorer 6 reads.

In February 2011 Tumblr’s wordmark spans the top of the page, over three phones showing Tumblr. The one on the right is a BlackBerry. The sign-up form has shrunk to one row, Email address, Password, URL and Start posting!, and the browser tab now says Sign up | Tumblr. At the bottom is a bar with an arrow: 30 reasons you'll love Tumblr.

The reasons wait in the page’s code, under that bar. Some are still familiar: Custom domains, with the example Turn marco.tumblr.com into www.marco.org. Others belong to their year, like Post via AIM and Call us at 1-866-584-6757 and record an audio post for your blog.

The app gets a boast, the best iPhone publishing app in existence (for free). One reason is titled Nothing you don't want: Tumblr doesn't force any ads, banners, or logos into your theme. Another ends Dozens of Tumblr blogs have even received book deals!

The February 2012 capture keeps the layout: the three phones, the one-row form and the reasons bar. The posts on the iPhone’s screen are different, and the footer has lost its English and Deutsch links.

On November 16, 2011, Tumblr turned its protest against the SOPA bill into phone calls. The next day the staff blog said the site had generated 87,834 calls to US Representatives.^[3] Our February 1, 2012 capture, eleven weeks after the protest, shows none of it. It still advertises 30 reasons you'll love Tumblr.

In February 2013 Tumblr’s logged-out homepage is a wall of posts. Photos, GIFs and illustrations fill a three-column grid, some tiles spanning two columns, most with tags underneath: a grinning broccoli, a black-and-white staircase, a forest in fog. The still shows the top of a page whose code holds 61 photo posts and 2 videos.

Three months later, on May 20, 2013, Yahoo announced that it would buy Tumblr for about $1.1 billion. The press release counted 50 billion blog posts, with 75 million more arriving each day, and pledged to run Tumblr independently. Its subheading made a promise.^[4]

Back on the homepage, the header has a search box, Search tags, and two buttons, Log in and Sign up. The sign-up form waits in the code with the line Follow the world’s creators. It asks How old are you? and offers two labels for the answer: years old and years young.

The February 2014 page is a centered sign-up box on plain blue: Follow the blogs you've been hearing about. Share the things you love. Along the bottom runs a counter, 169.2 million blogs, 75.2 billion posts, 30 seconds to join. Thirty seconds was the promise for the whole form: email, password, username.

Two things are missing from our still. The wordmark above the box doesn’t render, and neither does the background picture. Its credit did render, in the corner: Posted by christiancgarrido. Every capture from 2014 to 2021 has a credit like it, naming the Tumblr blog behind the backdrop.

In February 2015 the backdrop is a beach seen from above, Posted by itsparadiselost, and the wordmark is back. The counter reads 221.3 million blogs and 102.5 billion posts. A column of six small circles on the left marks the page’s six sections in the code, from login to welcome. And at the very bottom there is a new green bar: What is Tumblr?

In the page’s code, the panel behind that bar begins Tumblr is so easy to use that it’s hard to explain. Then it explains anyway. People post Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff.

Another line in the code takes the joke back: Okay, it’s not actually hard to explain. We lied. But now you understand this thing. So come on in.

The panel counts too: Tumblr is 221 million different blogs, filled with literally whatever. By February 2016 the counter has left Tumblr’s first screen. The backdrop is a blurred photo, App Store and Google Play badges sit under the form, and the panel’s sentence now says 277 million.

From February 2017 Tumblr’s backdrop is an illustration that fills the screen, and the sign-up fields are gone from the first screen. Two buttons replace them, a blue Get Started and a white Log In, under a two-line tagline: Come for what you love. Stay for what you discover. In the 2017 capture the art is a green-haired figure beside a black creature covered in eyes, credited to spokeart.

A link under the buttons says Here's what's trending. The February 2018 capture keeps the layout around a portrait of an elderly man, credited to clbunce. Each capture in this stretch has a different backdrop and a different credit. Behind the green bar, the count says 334 million blogs in 2017 and 394 million in 2018.

On December 3, 2018, Tumblr announced that it would ban adult content, enforced from December 17.^[5] The announcement admitted that filtering would be hard, and named two things a filter had to tell apart from adult content: a political protest with nudity or the statue of David.^[5]

Flagged posts stopped being public, and the staff blog promised: Your content will not be deleted.^[6]

Look at Tumblr’s wordmark in the February 2019 capture: tumblr, with no full stop. Every earlier wordmark in our captures that renders has the period. The layout stays, with new painted art (credited to likatnes), the same tagline and buttons, and a brighter green bar.

The login has a new option in the code: Send me a magic link, followed by It contains a magic link that'll log you in. The panel’s count kept climbing, to 457 million blogs. Traffic went the other way. SimilarWeb estimated Tumblr’s global visits at 521 million in December 2018 and 370 million in February 2019, two months after the ban (reported).^[7]

In August 2019 Matt Mullenweg announced that his company, Automattic, was acquiring Tumblr.^[8] The price wasn’t disclosed. The Verge, citing Axios, put it at less than $3 million, against the $1.1 billion Yahoo had paid in 2013 (reported).^[9]

The February 2020 capture of Tumblr’s homepage keeps the layout, tagline and buttons, with new art of two archers credited to auroradiation. One footer link is new, Do Not Sell My Personal Information.

In February 2021 the backdrop is red glitch art, credited to krmljam. The footer adds California Privacy Notice and writes the other link in lowercase, Do not sell my personal information. The count behind the green bar says 490 million blogs in 2020 and 517 million in 2021. Then, in 2022, it says 500 million.

The February 2022 capture has no background art at all. The page is flat navy, the wordmark is heavier and flatter, and the tagline is new: Make stuff, look at stuff, talk about stuff, find your people. Under a blue Sign up and a green Log in come two more buttons, Continue with Google and Continue with Apple.

The green bar is still at the bottom. Its panel keeps the old sentence with a new number, Tumblr is 500 million different blogs, filled with literally whatever. Nearby, the code lists seven kinds of post: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio and Video. The 2008 page had named six things to share, with music in place of audio and no chat.

That November Tumblr started selling blue checkmarks. They verified nothing. For $7.99 you got two of them for your blog, on the web only at first, and Tumblr called them Important Blue Internet Checkmarks.^[10]

On January 1, 2023, the crawler got a different kind of homepage. The tab says Trending topics on Tumblr, and the page is the site itself: a logged-out Trending feed with tabs for Trending, Staff Picks and More. The middle of our 2023 still, where the posts would be, is blank. On the right, under suggested blogs, an orange card says Curate your own Dashboard and You'll never be bored again. A purple box at the bottom asks again, It's time to try Tumblr, with Maybe later beside Sign me up.

Below the orange card sits a heading, Sponsored, and the line Wanna go ad-free? The 2011 reasons had promised that Tumblr doesn't force any ads, banners, or logos into your theme. That promise was about blogs. The homepage now has an ad slot of its own.

A year later Tumblr’s menu has moved to a left column, with Explore and Change palette under the wordmark. The tabs read Today, Trending, Staff Picks and Answer Time. In August 2023 Tumblr had rolled out a web interface with its navigation on the left; TechCrunch compared it to X and reported that many users objected (reported).^[11] A purple bar now covers the bottom of the page: Join over 100 million people using Tumblr to find their communities and make friends.

The February 2025 capture of the homepage address shows the Communities page. The tab says Browse communities on Tumblr, and big colored tiles fill the middle, starting with Aesthetic, Anime and Art. The page’s code lists 14 of them, down to Writing. A few tiles have pictures; most are plain orange, red, blue or purple.

In September 2026 Tumblr’s homepage is Explore again. The left menu holds Explore, Communities, Change palette, a blue Sign up and Log in. The tabs are Trending, Staff Picks, Videos and More, and the trending tiles are numbered tags: bb28, aew, dc and oc. The purple bar is still at the bottom, still counting over 100 million people.

Behind the page, Automattic said in August 2024 that it had begun moving Tumblr’s backend to WordPress, and that Tumblr hosts over half a billion blogs.^[12] The purple bar counts people. Automattic counted blogs.

2007 · tumblelogs2026 · trending

◀ ▶

The 2007 homepage explained itself in 19 words, and they were about one new word, tumblelog. The word left the visible page after our 2008 capture. It lingered in the code, in names no visitor reads, through our 2024 capture.

The explaining lasted longer. The easiest way to blog. Twenty-four reasons, then 30, then a counter and a green bar that asked What is Tumblr? in every capture from 2015 to 2022.

The September 2026 page doesn’t ask. It opens on the day’s trending tags and gives one line, in the purple bar, for why you might stay: to find their communities and make friends.