Could Euphoria Cause A Tumblr Resurgence?

To the viewers who love it, Euphoria has it all: gorgeous cinematography, a great soundtrack and a talented ensemble. Twitter went crazy for the show every week, with “Euphoria” and other related tags trending worldwide for hours after each new episode aired.

But Twitter wasn’t the only place celebrating the show: Tumblr — which, yes still exists — seemed energized by the show as well.

One of the OG blogging platforms, founded in 2007, it’s been years since Tumblr had seen the traffic it got following Euphoria’s premiere. In an interview with Input, Cates Holderness, Tumblr’s Trend Expert, said that “When Euphoria first came out in 2019, it resonated immediately with Tumblr users. They loved the cinematography, they loved the storyline.”

The platform, which had over 400 million accounts in 2019, is far from the powerhouse it was in its heyday. After the site banned adult content in 2018, it quickly declined in popularity. But renewed interest in the platform through a show like Euphoria could be a back-to-basics moment for the site: it is first and foremost a platform based on aesthetics.

From recreations of character Cassie’s flower-bed breakdown, to GIF sets celebrating the ship Fexi, the show and its related tags have blown up; Input found that there was a 2939.53 percent increase in engagements with the “Euphoria” tag as Season Two premiered.

Euphoria is one in a series of teen shows that have dominated the site based on their aesthetics: before Euphoria, it was the UK show Skins, all of the dystopian teen franchises (think Hunger Games and Divergent), and anything John Green wrote. That fact is even referenced within Euphoria, through the character Kat’s “Tumblr Queen” storyline of tween Kat writing One Direction fanfiction on the site (Barbie Ferreira, the actress who portrays Kat, also had her start on Tumblr.)

Fandom is in the platform’s life blood, and that is in part because content is more easily curated on Tumblr than any other social media. Pretty much, if you want to just see Euphoria content, you can more easily do that on Tumblr than TikTok or Twitter, because you would only be following other Euphoria blogs. That could be what makes the site return in popularity, with fandoms for shows like Euphoria driving users to the platform in order to escape, well, everything else on social media.