If you use Tumblr, you’re probably either accustomed to seeing plenty of animated GIFs cycle through your feed, or are putting them in your own posts. They’re pretty popular on the service.

That’s probably why Tumblr, via its staff blog, just announced that it’s increased the size limit for these to 1MB. Previously, the limit was 500KB.

Animated GIFs have been around about as long as I’ve been using the Internet, if not longer. It’s been interesting to see them kind of fade into obscurity only to see them have something of a resurgence thanks to networks like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Tumblr.

Even Conan O’Brien is using them on the Team CoCo Tumblr. So is Comedy Central. It’s interesting to see the big brands adopt this element of web culture.

LOLSlater is a great Tumblr for animated GIFs like this:

Tumblr’s traffic has been on the rise, and we can probably expect the animated GIFs to keep rolling. It looks like iPad traffic in particular has been doing quite well.

Tumblr says it has a bunch of mobile updates coming over the next few weeks.