Tumblarity is an interesting way to approach this problem. At Facebook, we approach this problem in a similar way through measuring Facebook Applications on a metric we developed called “Daily Active Users.” However, we did start out measuring the economy through rather crude metrics such as total number of users or total pageviews.

Ultimately, we found that the best way to measure quality is by looking at daily engagement. Cool that Tumblr is helping their publishers look at a similar metric in an understandable way.

I have one question for David and team, though. How high does this score go? What are we shooting for?

david:

Mike Hudack: “I feel like this is embarrassingly low.”

We’ve designed Tumblarity to fluctuate relatively rapidly based on recent activity.  This will play a big part in the new Directory, which will value quality and activity over static metrics like “followers”.