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Remember LiveJournal? The blogging site from 1999 still has fans

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livejournal still popular despite tumblr capturing the blogging audience front page
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Is LiveJournal still part of your daily Web-browsing routine? At one point, it might have been. According to Bitly’s infographic, which illustrates several social networks’ first-quarter results, the usual Internet hangouts such as Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook are experiencing growth. Surprisingly, LiveJournal still has a significant Web presence despite being eclipsed by the other four sites in traffic.

LiveJournal, one of the oldest blog communities on the Internet, was launched by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999 as a way to keep his friends updated on what he was doing. The site has since been eclipsed by new social media heavyweights such as Facebook and Twitter, which made communities like LiveJournal a less popular hangout spot on the Internet. However, LiveJournal still ranks highly on Alexa analytics rating, and the Russian edition of the website is actually growing in popularity. LiveJournal reported 51.8 percent overall growth last quarter. Surprisingly, desktop growth (61.5 percent) greatly outpaced tablet (26.7 percent) and mobile growth (23.9 percent), showing that it is still going strong among desktop users.

Tumblr, Yahoo’s microblogging service with 474 million monthly users, reported a whopping 128.6 percent growth in traffic over last year. Most of Tumblr’s growth has also come from desktop users (193 percent), at a time when most social media websites are increasing in mobile traffic.

WordPress, another popular blogging website, is one of Tumblr’s biggest competitors. According to World Wide Web Technology Surveys (W3Techs), WordPress is used by many low-traffic websites, where the majority of personal blogs fall. According to Alexa, Tumblr ranks 35th worldwide while WordPress is 36th. The main difference is that WordPress is also used as a content management system by several businesses, while Tumblr is more for everyday users.

Reddit’s Q1 growth can be attributed to users’ preference for access the Internet with mobile devices. Reddit reported 94.4 percent growth in traffic from mobile and 86.6 percent from tablets. According to AdWeek, certain viral events such as “The Fappening,” a leak of nude pics of celebrities, could have also contributed to the growth. Reddit had 168 million unique visitors in 2015, and the ability for anyone to create “subreddits” on just about any topic makes users flock to Reddit not only for community, but also for news and education.

Facebook’s desktop audience has dropped 3.3 percent, while experiencing growth among smartphone (26.8 percent) and tablet users (14.9 percent). Twitter measured small gains in both mobile and desktop users. These numbers should show you which communities people are still flocking to and what they are using to visit them — at least, for now.

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Jose Alvarez
Jose Alvarez
Former Digital Trends Contributor
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