Ignore The Haters: This Chart Shows Tumblr's Traffic Is Probably NOT Tanking

Tumblr has removed its traffic reports from measurement service Quantcast, Valleywag reports, adding in a bunch of speculation that maybe the site's userbase has declined following its May acquisition by Yahoo. BuzzFeed in August also argued that Tumblr's audience was shrinking.

But numbers from comScore suggest that probably isn't so. Tumblr's monthly unique visitors are fairly stable, according to comScore data:

There are some caveats to comScore's data, but it turns out those caveats suggest Tumblr is growing rather than shrinking. These numbers only cover data on U.S. desktop traffic. The chart doesn't cover global traffic or mobile device traffic.

In recent years, mobile traffic has begun to eclipse web traffic. Most people now access Facebook on their phones, not their computers, for instance.

And a lot of sites have seen their desktop traffic decline simply because their mobile traffic has risen.

Tumblr's mobile app is easy to use, and contains almost all the functionality of the web version. So it's likely that in addition to the above numbers, Tumblr has seen mobile growth too.

The mere fact that Tumblr has seen year-on-year growth of about 5 million unique visitors per month, to 35 million in November 2013, among U.S. desktop users alone, suggests its total traffic, including mobile, has grown even more.

Tumblr is likely growing, not shrinking, in other words.

We asked Tumblr for comment and didn't hear back.