Tumblr: Passionate about television

When you’re a big fan of a tv-show, it is very easy to become obsessed with it. When combined with designing skills this can lead to all kinds of awesome fan art. Take this incredible Game of Thrones fan poster for example. Tumblr is a site that largely thrives on these graphics made by passionate fandoms.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform where people can post (self-generated) content, or reblog things they see on other blogs. Usually these things are graphics of some kind, animated gif’s mostly. Users can follow blogs, which causes its content to appear directly on their dashboard. When following enough blogs, this makes for a fast, continuous stream of new images.

The tagging system makes searching for graphics related to a certain topic very easy, which is why there are countless blogs related to a certain theme. These blogs generally reblog a lot of the stuff that shows up on a specific tag. Communitythings, for example, is a blog dedicated to the NBC series Community. It is filled with gif sets and other Community-themed posts, most of which are being reblogged by hundreds of people. This causes the images to appear on the dashboards of people who don’t necessarily follow Communitythings or even watch the show, thereby spreading the show’s awareness. This can be greatly beneficial to the network and the tv-series itself.

However, as of yet not a lot of networks have capitalized on this phenomenon. The themed blogs are almost always created and managed by fans of the program. BBC America is an exception, however. They created official Tumblr-pages for Doctor Who, as well as Top Gear. On it, they post a mix of original content and reblogs of fan-made stuff. And looking at the amount of notes, it seems successful. You can hardly go wrong with stimulating the people who are passionate about your show.

 

• If you’re lucky, the makers of tv-series do notice your (themed) blogs and the stuff that is posted on it. Which makes it all the more awesome when they love it! I mean, just look at those messages at the bottom of this page. To say I'm incredibly jealous would be putting it mildly.