tumblr Sold to WordPress.com Owner for Mega-Cheap

It was recently announced that Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to sell tumblr to the owner of WordPress.com.

Verizon is apparently unloading the blogging site — a space that Yahoo purchased for over a billion dollars in 2013 — for a song: Less than three million dollars, according to Dan Primack, “biz editor” at Axios.com.

tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art. Once an internet darling, the site has been trounced by spaces like Facebook, Reddit and other services in recent years.

The site’s user numbers dropped significantly following 2018’s “porn ban” — a terms and conditions change that occurred last December wherein “posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on tumblr.” Per analytics from SimilarWeb, visits to tumblr dropped from 521 million in December 2018 to 437 million in January 2019.

3/ Story updated: Price less than $3 million.

— Dan Primack (@danprimack) August 12, 2019

According to the Wall Street Journal, Automattic Inc., the actual purchasing entity, will take on about tumblr 200 staffers. And though this acquisition is the largest ever in terms of price and head count for Automattic, don’t get your hopes up for a return to tumblr’s former sex-positive, inclusive glory days.

Regarding the porn ban, the Journal reported that Automattic Inc.’s Chief Executive Matt Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress. “It’s just fun,” the Journal reported he said of tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

Because adult content is apparently not “fun.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the sale is part of a larger “media unit revamp” for Verizon. Apparently, revenue within Verizon Media Group was $1.8 billion in the second quarter, down 2.9 percent from a year earlier.

“Verizon is in the process of revamping its media group, which struggled to meet revenue targets in recent years,” the Journal wrote. “The business, home to legacy Yahoo and AOL web properties such as HuffPost, TechCrunch, feminist media brand Makers and celebrity-interview site Build, is increasingly focused on subscription and original content.”