Within 4 years of its launch, Tumblr microblogging platform has left WordPress.com, with 8 years of internet operations behind, hosting more blogs than the latter, according to Mashable news blog.

In January, Tumblr had more than 7 million individual blogs. Now, the total blog ticker on its site read about three times that at 20,873,182 - beating out WordPress.com’s current count by about 85,000 blogs.

WordPress.com’s count doesn’t include sites that people host themselves with the open source software via WordPress.org, but given that the hosted service had about a four-year headstart, surpassing it in number is still an impressive feat for Tumblr.

Clearly a flood of individuals have been signing up for Tumblr lately. But top companies in entertainment and news and fashion have also recently launched Tumblr blogs. They’re using the platform in a very different way than they use WordPress.com.

WordPress.com has long hosted the main sites of top brands such as the National Football League, CNN and TED. Most Tumblr blogs function much more like another social media presence - something like a cross between websites and Facebook profiles.