Case Study: The 90's Rock Blog
Site URL: http://90srock.net
Date Built: April 2010
Publishing Platform: Tumblr
90srock.net, aka The 90's Rock Blog was a three-fold experiment:
- To give the Tumblr community-driven blogging software a spin, and see how fast it would take to build a following within the community versus making a standalone self-hosted blog.
- To see how "scraped" content could be used to create a website people would actually want to visit and follow.
- To create an awesome blog dedicated to 90's rock videos.
How It Was Done
The site was built overnight on Tumblr, routed through a custom domain pointed to Tumblr's servers. The entire site, blog, archives and submission form are all powered by Tumblr's API. The most complicated part was designing the "collage" of album covers to function as the background.
Because of daily updating and targeting users with like interests, it immediately built a huge following within days. Within a week of its launch, viewers were already reposting 90srock.net posts to their own Tumblr blogs, as well as submitting videos of their own through the site's submission form, which allows any viewer to function as a contributing editor.
All content is "scraped" from video sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion. They are queued up by the dozen, and Tumblr automatically posts a new one at specified intervals to keep the blog consistently active and followers engaged.
Because of the ease that one can engage the Tumblr community and generate inbound links through viewers' ability to "reblog" any post on the blog, it has been determined through the 90srock.net experiment that the Tumblr platform has vast potential for creating topic-specific communities of people with relatively little effort. While we have the ability to offer this to our clients, in the meantime, lets enjoy the music.