Tumblr has more 214 million blogs on its network, and its users are closing in on 100 billion posts published. That’s a hell of a lot of content, and today the Yahoo-owned company added a new discovery feature to help users find what’s interesting to them on the service, which is reportedly the internet’s fastest growing social media platform.
The new ‘Explore’ button looks like a compass and sits between the home and message button on the desktop version of the service. Clicking it serves up new content based on a few different metrics.
Explore dishes up text, photos, GIFs, quotes, audio, video and other content based on other Tumblr blog posts that a user has liked. It also mixes in content that is “trending” on the service in real-time, and it adds ‘staff picks’ which have been highlighted by the folks at Tumblr HQ.

Tumblr already showcases new content from blogs a user follows in the stream in their dashboard and it offers search, and explore is nicely complementary. Particularly since the trending content within its search feature is fairly buried on the web version of the service.
The company describes it as being “kind of like search, but for when you can’t think of anything,” and it will also be available on Tumblr.com for those not logged in to the service, perhaps to tempt them into signing up. For those who do log in, the idea is to give Tumblr users a little nudge that will increase their engagement. That’s the very same reason that it launched its first Mac app in October.
Tumblr is looking to increase engagement right after the introduction of a number of strategies that are aimed at monetizing its hugely popular service.
The company introduced auto-playing video ads in user dashboards in October, and then it turned to mobile with the rollout of sponsored post-like app ad installs less than a month later. It added a third layer last week with new action buttons from Kickstarter, Artsy, Etsy and Dosomething.
