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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#41

Post by amyjess »

exogeny wrote: post #30

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 that acquisition and just let it start to die on the vine, and when Verizon took over, they pissed away whatever goodwill they had left by gutting Tumblr.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#42

Post by freehunter »

amyjess wrote: post #26
skilled wrote: post #4

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.

My assumption is that two things are happening: 1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices. 2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put t…

They've already said they won't reverse the porn ban.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#43

Post by xwdv »

knd775 wrote: post #24
romwell wrote: post #20

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.”

So basically an exercise in blowing several million dollars.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#44

Post by taurath »

ravenstine wrote: post #25
skilled wrote: post #4

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.

Their brand wasn't particularly strong in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for years it was widely known as a home to porn and people blogging about genders. I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr. Maybe it could be turned around, but it's pretty old-school at this point and seems hardly better to me than MySpace.

It was really really huge for the LGBTQ community. There has been no replacement.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#45

Post by amyjess »

freehunter wrote: post #42
amyjess wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My assumption is that two things are happening: 1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices. 2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put t…

They've already said they won't reverse the porn ban.

So it's an acquihire then.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#46

Post by opencl »

dmix wrote: post #13
skilled wrote: post #4

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.

Is it just me or does Tumblr feel really heavy weight and bloated when you open even small blog posts the size of a tweet? They had the opportunity to be the light weight blogging option. But its various design decisions seem strange to me as an outsider. Maybe it needs to revisit its past minimalism? ala old Twitter.

Well they decided to allow users to use arbitrary HTML themes for their blogs so there's not a whole lot they can do about that. The default theme isn't too terrible but a lot of the user themes are.

The worst is people using some old theme that embeds a script hosted on a site that no longer exists and the whole page load hangs until the request times out.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#47

Post by monocasa »

amyjess wrote: post #26
skilled wrote: post #4

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.

My assumption is that two things are happening: 1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices. 2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put t…

Pure aquihire then it sounds like:

>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.”

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#48

Post by minimaxir »

ojbyrne wrote: post #10
rmason wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't published a sale price. Doubt very much if Matt Mullenweg over paid for it. If the price is low enough that Tumblr cash flows or close to it with existing advertising revenue then it was a pretty smart purchase.

Techcrunch says the number is "nominal:" https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/12/verizon-is-selling-tumblr-...

Axios says "well south of $20M": https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1161015743531618305

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#49

Post by bkberry352 »

afturner wrote: post #28
simcop2387 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

December 17th 2018, maybe? I know I stopped seeing a lot of tumblr links when that policy changed, even ones that weren't affected by the change. I'm curious how much traffic and posting changed when that finally went into effect.

This paints a pretty clear picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=tumblr&geo=US

Does it? This seems to indicate that the site has been declining since 2013 and that the policy was more of a "final straw" type factor

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#50

Post by aj7 »

romwell wrote: post #20

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).

All migrated to Reddit already.
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