Yahoo! today confirmed that it’s buying 6-year-old blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Who uses Tumblr? We consulted the recent report on social media demographics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project to find out:
Only 6% of Internet users surveyed in late 2012 reported using Tumblr, versus two-thirds for Facebook. Three other social networking services (Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) were clustered together, with between 13% and 16% of users saying they’d used any of them.
Tumblr is most popular among young adults: 13% of 18- to-29-year-olds said they used the service. But it still ranked last among that age group of the five social media companies we asked about.
Unlike other social media platforms, Tumblr users are equally divided between men and women. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest all are more popular among women; men are slightly more likely than women to use Twitter.
Tumblr’s users are clustered at the low and high ends of the income scale: 8% of people with household incomes above $75,000 report using it, as well as 6% of people with incomes below $30,000.
Like most other social networking services, Tumblr tends to skew toward the urban and educated. Seven percent of urban Internet users say they use Tumblr, as does the same percentage of online users with college degrees.
