Interesting Tumblr Stats

If you're doing follow/unfollow to gain followers on Tumblr (I know there are methods other than that) then this might be of interest to you. The technique that I use that seems to be the one advocated by people on BHW, is to scrape user names from the notes (reblogs/likes) of other blogs that are similar to yours.

I did this for a bunch of NSFW blogs and was able to scrape about 1.5M user names from about a dozen NSFW blogs and then I followed between 170-195 of those users per day and got about 8% follow back on average (not including organic growth). I decided to check the 'quality' of these blogs that I was following by writing a script and collecting data from the API. This is what I found.

1. 6.6% of blogs no longer existed. (even though the accounts were no longer there, their notes still remained)
2. Only 14% were set as NSFW (even though they had rebloged or liked NSFW content)
3. 36% had not posted in over 30 days (basically inactive and therefore basically useless)

The most important stat I came up with is I data mined for blogs that had posted in the last 7 days and had more than 500 posts (the API does not let me see how many followers a blog has apart from my own). My assumption here was that blogs that fell into this category were more likely to a. still be around and therefore possibly follow me b. have followers themselves so that if they reblog my content other people would see it and c. might actually reblog my stuff in the first place.

Of the 1.5M blog database I had, only 42% of blogs fell into this 'active' category. I then cleaned the list and brought it down to around 630,000. I then plugged that into my follow/unfollow bot and my followback rate went from 8% to 19%, my organic growth also went up but I don't have exact stats on that.

Hope some of you find this info useful.

You followed 1.5M people (170-195 per day) ? U sure?

No I had a list of 1.5M users and randomly selected 170-195 per day per account using a bot. (I have 75 accounts)

Interesting post, thanks for sharing your findings.

Did you test the follow back % of only following active accounts, against randomly following?

You say you pulled the users from the notes. How were you finding the posts? Via search or google scraping.

I would imagine you would have got more "active" accounts (but less results) from scraping a search with a recent filter.


Food for thought on how you can do more with less.

What software are you using to automate this? Thanks.

zenlagor said:

What software are you using to automate this? Thanks.

Click to expand...

Also curious. Those are interesting numbers.

My 'clean' list of 630k accounts were active accounts. Accounts with > 500 posts and had posted in less than 7 days. So yeah, the followback went from 8% to 19%. So they weren't random accounts, they were randomly chosen (170-195 follows) per day from that list.

I got the original list of 1.5M accounts using a RUBY script I found on GitHub (Google this - kristopolous tumblr-scraper) and I did the 'cleaning' using a PHP script I wrote myself that interfaces with the API.

The next step for me, will be to create a 'real time' scraper using PHP and the API to scrape users that have reblogged in the last couple of minutes so that they might be actually still be online when I follow them and they'll see the follow notification straight away. But that's a little while away as I working on Twitter scripts at the moment, but I will get back to it.

I understand that a lot of this is outside the skill level of a lot of people on here. I just thought that I might share my findings. Basically, the newer/cleaner your list is, the better followback that you'll get, the faster you will grow...

I wrote my own using PHP/CasperJS/SlimerJS. The commercial bots out there lacked the flexibility and scalability that I was looking for, Also allowed me to run the bot on hosted VPS machines so that I didnt have to have a PC at home running 24/7.

rootjazz said:

Interesting post, thanks for sharing your findings.

Did you test the follow back % of only following active accounts, against randomly following?

You say you pulled the users from the notes. How were you finding the posts? Via search or google scraping.

I would imagine you would have got more "active" accounts (but less results) from scraping a search with a recent filter.


Food for thought on how you can do more with less.

Click to expand...

Just noticed your Sig

struggling to post replies here cos i am a noob is there a character limit ?

I have noticed this from the nature of tmblr and I am quite noob to this. You tend to get followbacks from people who are active at the time you follow them, many blogs are abandoned quite quickly on tmblr due to the way you can easily make a new one. For people who are using it recreationally and not studying how to manipulate traffic they have a simple way of thinking ............if nobody follows one blog they make another, so any likes or notes on the old blog become irrelevant. They may repeat this process until they have a few tblr friends on one account and then stick to that.
Anyway, what I should tell you guys even though I am a noob is that I bought a domain last month and in 1 month set myself a target of 5,000 followers on twtr/fbb and tblr (natural followers and no bots and starting from scratch) in an over saturated niche. I am just doing this as a learning exercise, I currentley have almost 1.5k+ twitter followers, 2k tblr 650 fbk page likes and growing steadily daily

the rules for noobs are crazy on here yo, trying to post up the second part of my post

ninjah33 said:

I have noticed this from the nature of tmblr and I am quite noob to this. You tend to get followbacks from people who are active at the time you follow them, many blogs are abandoned quite quickly on tmblr due to the way you can easily make a new one. For people who are using it recreationally and not studying how to manipulate traffic they have a simple way of thinking ............if nobody follows one blog they make another, so any likes or notes on the old blog become irrelevant. They may repeat this process until they have a few tblr friends on one account and then stick to that.
Anyway, what I should tell you guys even though I am a noob is that I bought a domain last month and in 1 month set myself a target of 5,000 followers on twtr/fbb and tblr (natural followers and no bots and starting from scratch) in an over saturated niche. I am just doing this as a learning exercise, I currentley have almost 1.5k+ twitter followers, 2k tblr 650 fbk page likes and growing steadily daily

Click to expand...

Yeah, even though Tumblr has 210M blogs it has only around 90M active users monthly. That alone should tell you something. Still a good source of traffic though. And they don't screw with your reach like FB does. If one of my Tumblr followers is online when I post something, 100% they will see it. Not 2-3% like on FB.

Thanks for the scraper suggestion seogootwit.

This is my first time experience with Ruby. So I installed Ruby and ran the ruby file $ ruby tumblr-all-downloader.rb someblogname.tumblr.com /raid/some-destination

It outputs errors, but Ruby is installed. How can I get this to run?

Screenshot :

Thanks in advance...

These are quite a great number of followers, Have you check followers yet by making new posts?

If they are reblogging, Liking or comments?

Thanks

seogootwit said:

My 'clean' list of 630k accounts were active accounts. Accounts with > 500 posts and had posted in less than 7 days. So yeah, the followback went from 8% to 19%. So they weren't random accounts, they were randomly chosen (170-195 follows) per day from that list.

I got the original list of 1.5M accounts using a RUBY script I found on GitHub (Google this - kristopolous tumblr-scraper) and I did the 'cleaning' using a PHP script I wrote myself that interfaces with the API.

The next step for me, will be to create a 'real time' scraper using PHP and the API to scrape users that have reblogged in the last couple of minutes so that they might be actually still be online when I follow them and they'll see the follow notification straight away. But that's a little while away as I working on Twitter scripts at the moment, but I will get back to it.

I understand that a lot of this is outside the skill level of a lot of people on here. I just thought that I might share my findings. Basically, the newer/cleaner your list is, the better followback that you'll get, the faster you will grow...

Click to expand...

Definitely a great point. I settle for daily scraping, knowing that the user is active at least in the last few hours.

The thing is I feel like most personal blogs, owned by normal people, don't get followed very often. And since Tumblr doesn't really have a notification system (for desktop at least) that really alerts the user when they get a new follower, I think they rely on closely monitoring their followers number, so regardless if they see it a few hours later, or within a few minutes, they are probably going to look at the blog that followed them.

That's just my logic, have I tested it? No. So it's really just a hunch.

Hello,

Its useful for me thanks for Informations...

SYKing said:

These are quite a great number of followers, Have you check followers yet by making new posts?

If they are reblogging, Liking or comments?

Thanks

Click to expand...

I don't have exact numbers because that's too hard to track right now, but in short - YES. The 'clean' list of blogs to follow has definitely increased reblogs/likes and organic new follower growth.

| ALIEN | said:

Thanks for the scraper suggestion seogootwit.

This is my first time experience with Ruby. So I installed Ruby and ran the ruby file $ ruby tumblr-all-downloader.rb someblogname.tumblr.com /raid/some-destination

It outputs errors, but Ruby is installed. How can I get this to run?

Screenshot :

Thanks in advance...

Click to expand...

1. Go back to the GitHub page and make sure you've installed the correct version of Ruby. I first scraped these accounts a few months back so I don't recall but I do remember the version was important.
2. The script requires about a dozen or so Ruby Gems which need to be installed individually. Annoying I know but it is what it is. You see in the error "could not find curb-0.8.5'? That's the Ruby Gem that needs to be installed. Also ensure it is the exact version that is being asked for. Then re-run the script and it will tell you the next Gem that you need to install.
Keep doing that until it works.

Interesting read, how are you monetizing them?