Verizon sells Tumblr to WordPress owner – update

Verizon Communications has sold the microblogging service Tumblr to Automattic, a company that owns, among other things, WordPress. About two hundred Tumblr employees are part of the acquisition.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the sale of Tumblr to Automattic is part of a reorganization of Verizon Media Group, the media division of Verizon that also includes The Huffington Post and TechCrunch. Details about the acquisition, such as an acquisition amount, are not known. However, according to Axios, the acquisition amount is well below $ 20 million.

That’s significantly less than what Yahoo paid for Tumblr in 2013, $1.1 billion. In 2017, Verizon acquired Yahoo and acquired Tumblr. Tumblr has 450 million blogs, but the growth has stopped and the service is loss-making. Tumblr lags far behind social media competitors like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest in terms of users.

In May, it became clear that Verizon wanted to get rid of Tumblr. The only potential takeover candidate that showed public interest was Pornhub. The new owner, Automattic, announces that it will maintain Tumblr’s current porn restrictions. In addition to WordPress, Automattic also owns services such as Jetpack, Simplenote and Longreads. When the service was in its heyday, a large portion of Tumblr blogs involved pornography, but Yahoo banned porn after its acquisition in 2013.

Update, 11.00: According to Axios editor Dan Primack, the acquisition amount is even less than 3 million dollars.