Automattic.Inc, the owner of WordPress.com buys Tumblr. A platform that knew better times.
The owner of WordPress.com, the most popular open source content manager, will buy the platform Tumblr blogs for an amount of money not mentioned. However, some media talk about a maximum of $ 20 million. At its best, Tumblr was worth it. more than 1000 million dollars.
According to both companies, Automattic Inc, in addition to keeping the platform, will hire about 200 employees. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music, and art, but it has been overshadowed by Facebook, Reddit, and other services.
Automattic Inc is responsible for the content manager WordPress, from the blogging platforms WordPress.com and the e-commerce platform WooCommerce.
Tumblr was born in 2007 and 2013 bought by Yahoo for $ 1.100 billion during Marissa Mayer's tenure, but it didn't work out the way Yahoo expected. (Like almost everything Yahoo did in those years)
Yahoo was never able to make a profit, and the service also failed to achieve the popularity of Facebook or Instragram. dropped to $ 200 million 3 years later.
When Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017 it put Tumblr under its own brand. But, the change did not achieve better results either.
Everyone agrees that the decision, made at the end of last year, to ban all adult content due to concerns about the use of the site to share child pornography.
It was a bad decision because the platform had become a place for the LGBTQ community. This collective used it to explore and express their sexuality and find an online community that shared those interests. With the ban on adult content, users searched for other sites.
Although the plans of Automattic Inc are not known, it is known that the idea is that it is a complementary site to WordPress.com. Whatever this means. According to speculation in the media, they will share technology, but will continue to be two independent platforms.
Although many believe that blogging is a thing of the past, it seems that the people at Automattic think otherwise.