#theme makers

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Comparing the likes and reblogs

New Themes

First, let’s look at a few screenshots from recent themes. I will be grabbing from a variety of themes in tags + resource blogs to hopefully accurately depict what these ratios look like. These are all themes from this year:

I rounded the note counts up/down to make it easier, but this is approximately how simple I was able to get them without doing too much rounding:

11:5, 11:5, 17:8, 10:7, 15:7, 2:1, 23:10, 14:5, 3:1, 3:2

A lot of these were very close to 2:1, so that seems to be a common theme here, though there are obviously exceptions. I did come across one theme with a perfect 1:1 ratio (60 likes and 60 reblogs), but I lost the screenshot. I will add it again if I can find it.

This is all simplified of course, but I think a safe estimate is that themes have around 2-3 likes for 1 reblog.

Older Themes

Tumblr didn’t always have this feature of showing likes and reblogs separately, but sometimes it does still show for older posts. These themes from several years ago, around 2016 - 2018:

These ratios are roughly around:

14:5, 9:4, 9:7, 2:1, 1:1, 28:13, 2:1, 9:5, 8:1, 7:3

I was kind of surprised to find a lot of these also are somewhere around 2-3 likes to 1 reblog. Obviously with some outliers like the 1:1 and the more surprising 8:1.

These are pretty small sample sizes, so this should be taken with a grain of salt of course. I hopped around a bit more and found these results to be pretty consistent so far, but I will probably make a part 2 with more info!

So what does this mean?

Based on the themes I’ve seen, between 2:1 and 3:1 is the most common ratio on theme posts

From this, it seems that the like and reblog ratio hasn’t changed too much since 2016, but that doesn’t mean nothing changed.

It’s possible that the outliers with closer to 1:1 were more common in the past, but I haven’t found enough to confirm that.

The themes from 2020 seemed more consistent than the older themes, 8:1 being the worst out of all the themes I looked at which was from the older theme group.

I found that the note count is the biggest difference here, not the ratios. While most of the themes in both groups float around 300 - 700 notes, there were more themes in the 1,000+ group in older themes.

Why is this happening?

There’s a few reasons why the note difference is so big.

Since the ratios aren’t that different, there’s a few reasons this might be happening based on my personal observations:

A lot of people left after 2018. While I’m seeing more new blogs now than I did then, there’s still less people overall. 

These themes have been around longer, so naturally they would be accumulating more notes over time.

A lot of people blog from mobile and/or have stricter aesthetics than blogs used to have, which means those groups would probably not be interested in theme posts. 

Even though the like to reblog ratio has been fairly consistent over the years, it’s still about double the likes to reblogs.

I found that a lot of people who reblog are also people who like the post, myself included. It’s not that only half of the people are reblogging and double that amount are ignoring the post. There’s overlap, so there might always be at least a little more likes than reblogs (though this isn’t always the case). 

What do we do with this information?

Again, this is specific to the theme making community, so I can’t say the same for other communities. I encourage people in other communities to look into theirs because I’m sure this will vary a lot!

But in this case, it’s hard to say that the like to reblog ratio has gotten worse. 

My takeaway so far is:

1) We should expect less notes for now because people who probably used to use themes left the site, or switched to mobile only blogging. This isn’t something we can change or expect people to change at this point.You can still reach out to that audience, though! I will cover that in a future post.

2) The like to reblog ratio has been pretty consistent, which is sort of good news! It means that people aren’t necessarily reblogging themes less, there’s just less users. Reaching more users is another issue entirely, and I’ll try to make a post about that in the future. 

This isn’t saying that it’s wrong to want more people to reblog, not at all! It would be great to make the ratio even better than it was 2016 - now. But if we want to reach a wider audience, we do need to approach it from the right angle.

If what I found here is consistent, then the ratio isn’t what theme makers should be focusing on, and we shouldn’t compare our note counts to note counts in older themes. There were more people on the site then, and they’ve been around longer. It’s not a reflection of how good your work is! Your work is still worth it!