WordPress Owner Automattic Inc Buys Tumblr From Verizon

Verizon has agreed to sell micro-blogging website Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic Inc, Wall Street Journal reports.

The price amount for the deal is yet to be known. However, according to Axios, it’s well under $10 million. This is not even one-third of the price Yahoo paid when it acquired Tumble 6 years ago.

“We are proud of what the team has accomplished and are happy to have found the perfect partner in Automattic,” Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan said in a statement.

Back in 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for a whopping $1.1 billion. It was the acquisition of the year. Marissa Mayer, the then Yahoo CEO, called the deal a “game-changer.” But we all know how the story went — Verizon bought Yahoo and so Tumblr was also included in the shopping bag.

It has been quite a few rough years for the once-popular micro-blogging website. Social media websites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram have gone way ahead in the numbers, whereas Tumblr barely has any loyal userbase left. Back in March, reports emerged that Tumblr has lost over 30% traffic since December 2018.

One of the main reasons behind this drop was the adult content ban by Tumblr last year. Tumblr was even removed from the iOS App Store on accounts of keeping “pornographic content.” While Apple restored the app after Tumblr decided to remove all the “adult content,” the negative impact of the decision is still visible.

While Tumblr fans have lost all the hope, Automattic Inc seems pretty excited about the new future of Tumblr. “We are excited to add it [Tumblr] to our lineup, which already includes WordPress .com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, and more,” said Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

As part of the deal, Automattic has decided to take 200 Tumblr staffers.

Tumblr also shared the news in a blog post, “Automattic shares our vision to build passionate communities around shared interests…We’re excited for our future together!”