Tumblr is making the move to WordPress. After its 2019 acquisition by WordPress.com parent company Automattic in a $3 million fire sale, the new owner has focused on improving Tumblr’s platform and growing its revenue. Now Automattic will shift Tumblr’s back end over to WordPress, Automattic said in a blog post published on Wednesday.
The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr into WordPress; it will just run on WordPress.
“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.
Automattic says the move to WordPress will have its advantages, as it will make it easier to share the company’s work across the two platforms. That is, Automattic’s team will be able to build tools and features that work on both services, while Tumblr will be able to take advantage of the open source developments that take place on WordPress.org.
In addition, WordPress will be able to benefit from the “tools and creativity” that are invested into Tumblr.
Still, the move will be a technical challenge, given that Tumblr today hosts half a billion blogs.
“We’re talking about one of the largest technical migrations in internet history. Some people think it’s impossible. But we say, ‘challenge accepted,’” the company’s announcement boasted.
It’s worth pointing out that other companies have also made significant changes to their back end over the years, which were also arguably difficult. Among those in the social space, Twitter rewrote parts of its back end and underlying architecture while keeping the site functional in its earlier years. Slack also transitioned its app’s architecture to new code several years ago. Long before that, Myspace famously shifted its architecture over to Microsoft’s stack, potentially aiding in its demise.
Automattic didn’t offer any sort of timeframe as to how long it would take to complete such a project, nor did it share its roadmap. Instead, the post only served to announce its intentions to transition Tumblr to a WordPress back end at some point in the future.
A longtime popular place to socialize, blog, participate in fandoms, and more, Tumblr originally exited to Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent) for north of $1 billion under then-CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership in 2013. The hope at the time was to transform Tumblr into another social media powerhouse and to grow its ads business. However, the subsequent years were rough on Tumblr, as sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit dominated the space.
Even after Automattic acquired it, the site continued to lose money at a rate of $30 million each year, the company’s CEO Matt Mullenweg had said. Though the company benefited slightly from a Twitter exodus after the sale of the social network to new owner Elon Musk (who has since renamed it X), those new users didn’t translate to a significant increase in revenue.
Today, Tumblr makes money through a combination of digital goods, ads, and subscriptions.
Given the blogging site’s continued financial woes, Mullenweg shifted the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at Automattic late last year and laid off others. At the time, he suggested that moving Tumblr to WordPress would be “tricky” but added that new technology like AI would make it easier.
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