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Surprised by this news. Tumblr has lost a ton of momentum since its policy change, and the site itself doesn't have a very strong "brand" audience attached to it. Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
Surprised by this news. Tumblr has lost a ton of momentum since its policy change, and the site itself doesn't have a very strong "brand" audience attached to it. Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend. I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.
What's your plan to wind down Tumblr?
So, the real question is: are the censorship policies going to be reversed? To be specific, is adult content going to be kosher on Tumblr again? Because if not, I'd have very little faith in the platform (and I do have an account there).
Nope. >Mr. 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.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
Does anyone want to try to elucidate whatever bull case Yahoo! modeled out to buy it in the first place? Because God knows anyone with a brain should have probably been able to see that it was going to be a disaster.
Back in the '90s, Yahoo! owned some of the hottest properties on the Internet. But by the end of the '00s, those properties were all Web 1.0 dinosaurs that had long been surpassed by modern platforms. They wanted that old relevance back; they wanted to buy a modern platform that was popular with young people and had a huge userbase and cultural influence. And Yahoo!, being Yahoo!, never really knew what to do with th…
Tumblr was growing, but it was extremely young (read: low HHI, difficult to target, resistant to advertising) and extremely brand un-safe (read: impossible to monetize). So they had to believe one of four things:
1. The brand would grow into an older demographic, despite being not designed as such
2. Users would not leave in mass once brand-safety initiatives were to be put in place and/or advertisers wouldn't care
3. Some other business model would emerge, despite that not happening to almost any other similar consumer product ever
4. Display advertising would reverse the trend of CPMs plummeting and being sucked up by Facebook and Google
I can't imagine any competent M&A analyst actually looking at Tumblr and the state of the Internet ultimately believing any of them, which is why the deal was hugely baffling then.
I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend. I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.
We? So I take it you work at Automattic? Any insights about the decision to buy Tumblr?
Matt, while you're here can you comment on John O'Nolan's tweet [0] from July accusing Automattic of anti-competitive behavior w.r.t. Ghost [1]?
>Can never decide if I’m flattered or horrified that a $1.1billion, 1,000 person company w/ a 83% share of CMS market seriously employs a full-time team dedicated to attacking a 12 person bootstrapped non-profit org with an open source product
[0] https://twitter.com/johnonolan/status/1146075173134618625
Edit: Matt's not taken the opportunity to rebut John's claim after 50 mins, even though he's replied to a couple of other comments in this thread. I guess that's his prerogative, but ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you would choose to maintain Verizon's policy changes that alienated the majority of the user-base.
Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.
For me the most important aspect of this acquisition is that Automattic is a fully remote company. Tumblr's office space in New York City must be very expensive, I wonder if they're getting rid of it and transition everyone to remote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. >Mr. 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.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
So basically an exercise in blowing several million dollars.