Day 304

So 30,000 likes and reblogs sounds great but isn't quite all that it seems. All of that is just for the one post I made for Princess Bubblegum. I've posted other crayons since then with less than stellar results. The night after I posted PB, I uploaded BMO which now has about 200 notes. That's not bad but unfortunately the Bubblegum post has forever warped my expectations. Next I uploaded Zoidberg (48 notes), Bender (56), the Stormtrooper (9) and then Darth Vader (34). So those 30,000 notes for Princess Bubblegum aren't translating into many notes for the other crayons. Here's my theory why:

Even though people are reblogging my post onto their own blogs, it still has a source link that someone can click to get back to me. However very little people are doing that. I said before that most users don't upload their own content onto the site. They peruse other popular posts in their feeds, like and reblog things and then move on. They don't click the source link so they don't see the other crayons I've made. I assume this because if they liked the Princess Bubblegum one, then they probably would have liked at least one of the other crayons. There's very little trickle down. For every couple of hundred Bubblegum likes, I may see one like for one of the other dozen crayons that have been uploaded.

Since no one is curious to see the source of the crayon, I've gotten very few followers relatively speaking. This could also be a result of the audience. I think the typical Tumblr user skews young. The audience for Adventure Time also skews young as opposed to say Game of Thrones. After posting the GoT crayons, I had 5 followers from less than 100 total notes. Meanwhile 30,000 Adventure Time notes resulted in just 45 new followers (and maybe some of those came from the other crayons). So I think most of these younger users don't have a long enough attention span to find me and follow me.

I also opened up an Etsy store and put a link to it on the bottom of my Tumblr page which isn't too useful now that I realized people don't actually click through to my page. When Princess Bubblegum got around 6000 notes, I had the bright idea to edit my post to include the Etsy page in the caption. Unfortunately, I found out that most of the time when someone reblogs a post, the original caption gets removed so no one is seeing that link either. I could put the link onto the actual image but that seems a little desperate. Based on Etsy's statistics, the listing for Princess Bubblegum has only been viewed 50 times so all those notes haven't helped me that much.

Now for some random things. When someone reblogs something, they can add their own caption about it. For PB, this happens maybe one in three hundred notes. What people say about it can be generally grouped into cool/wow, how?, i want one, this dude has too much time on his hands, and i thought this was a dildo at first. Funny enough the dildo comments came up a few times. I said before my caption doesn't appear with my post so they can't tell what they're looking at until they click on it.

I noticed that a number of my reblogs and likes were coming from the blog of another person called amazingphil so I looked him up. Apparently he's a popular Youtube guy from the UK who has over a million subscribers to his channel. I'm not sure how many followers he has on Tumblr but I imagine it's a lot. He reblogged my post on Sunday so he didn't cause the huge Saturday explosion but he's definitely helped since. Thanks Phil.