Yahoo! today confirmed that it’s buying 6-year-old blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Who uses Tumblr? We consulted the recent report on social media demographics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project to find out:

Only 6% of Internet users surveyed in late 2012 reported using Tumblr, versus two-thirds for Facebook. Three other social networking services (Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) were clustered together, with between 13% and 16% of users saying they’d used any of them.

Tumblr is most popular among young adults: 13% of 18- to-29-year-olds said they used the service. But it still ranked last among that age group of the five social media companies we asked about.

Unlike other social media platforms, Tumblr users are equally divided between men and women. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest all are more popular among women; men are slightly more likely than women to use Twitter.

Tumblr’s users are clustered at the low and high ends of the income scale: 8% of people with household incomes above $75,000 report using it, as well as 6% of people with incomes below $30,000.

Like most other social networking services, Tumblr tends to skew toward the urban and educated. Seven percent of urban Internet users say they use Tumblr, as does the same percentage of online users with college degrees.

By Drew DeSilver

Yahoo! today confirmed that it’s buying 6-year-old blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Who uses Tumblr? We consulted the recent report on social-media demographics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project to find out:

 Only 6% of Internet users surveyed in late 2012 reported using Tumblr, versus two-thirds for Facebook. Three other social-networking services (Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) were clustered together, with between 13% and 16% of users saying they’d used any of them.

 Tumblr is most popular among young adults: 13% of 18-to-29-year-olds said they used the service. But it still ranked last among that age group of the five social media companies we asked about.

 Unlike other social-media platforms, Tumblr users are equally divided between men and women. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest all are more popular among women; men are slightly more likely than women to use Twitter.

 Tumblr’s users are clustered at the low and high ends of the income scale: 8% of people with household incomes above $75,000 report using it, as well as 6% of people with incomes below $30,000.

 Like most other social-networking services, Tumblr tends to skew toward the urban and educated. Seven percent of urban Internet users say they use Tumblr, as does the same percentage of online users with college degrees.

Drew DeSilver is a senior writer for the Pew Research Center.

Hundreds of tech analysts foresee a future with “smart” devices and environments that make people’s lives more efficient. But they also note that current evidence about the uptake of smart systems is that the costs and necessary infrastructure changes to make it all work are daunting. And they add that people find comfort in the familiar, simple, “dumb” systems to which they are accustomed.

Some 1,021 Internet experts, researchers, observers, and critics were asked about the “home of the future” in an online, opt-in survey. The result was a fairly even split between those who agreed that energy- and money-saving “smart systems” will be significantly closer to reality in people’s homes by 2020 and those who said such homes will still remain a marketing mirage

Read the full report.

The number of Americans who are smartphone owners now stands at 46%, an 11-point increase since last May. Smartphone owners now outnumber the 41% of adults who own a cellphone that is not a smartphone.

As smartphone ownership has grown over the last year, there has been a corresponding shift in the specific types of phones that Americans report owning:

• Android devices are used by 20% of cell owners, up from 15% in May 2011
• iPhones are used by 19% of cell owners, up from 10% in May 2011
• Blackberries are used by 6% of cell owners, down from 10% in May 2011

Read the full report, including details on smartphone ownership across demographic groups.

As online college courses have become increasingly prevalent, the general public and college presidents offer different assessments of their educational value. Just three-in-ten American adults (29%) say a course taken online provides an equal educational value to one taken in a classroom. By contrast, fully half of college presidents (51%) say online courses provide the same value.

More than three-quarters of the nation’s colleges and universities now offer online classes, according to the survey of college presidents, and about one-in-four college graduates (23%) have taken a course online, according to the general public survey. Among those who have graduated in the past decade, the figure rises to 46%. Adults who have taken a course online have a somewhat more positive view of the value of this learning format: 39% say a course taken online provides the same educational value as one taken in person, a view shared by only 27% of those who have not taken an online course.

These findings are from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted in spring 2011. One is a telephone survey taken among a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 colleges and universities nationwide.

See the full report at pewsocialtrends.org for more details on the use of online courses, future trends and the impact of technology such as increased use by students of tablet computers, laptops and other devices.