After dethroning Typepad in order to secure the bronze, it looks like Tumblr rise continues unabated as the company has revealed just how large the Tumblr universe is.

This has been an incredible year for Tumblr. What started as a fun experiment has grown into one of the largest networks on the web, serving billions of views across more than 11 million blogs.

It’s an unparalleled privilege to spend every single day building a product used by so many extraordinarily talented people. We are constantly in awe of your creations and projects, your communities and thoughtfulness. Every person on our team has been moved by this community in one way or another.

Nonetheless, all of this new attention has led to some serious growing pains over the last few months. (Tumblr Staff Blog)

Tumblr’s fast growth has come at a painful price, as the site was previously down for over 24 hours after the team attempted to update their servers in order to deal with the extraordinary growth of the site.

Tumblr’s 11 million blogs puts them within striking distance of WordPress.com, who currently boasts over 15 million blogs (although if include self hosted blogs that number balloons to over 32 million).

As far as traffic goes, WordPress.com is destroying Tumblr according to Compete.com and Quantcast, which may indicate that WP.com is much better at SEO than its micro-blogging rival.

While Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) assimilation of Windows Live Spaces should help put some distance between the two platforms, 2011 could be the year in which Tumblr jolts ahead of WP.com (at least as far as the number of blogs go).