Tumblr is Migrating 1/2 Billion Blogs to WordPress

Back in 2019, Automattic acquired Tumblr for $3 million. That was a huge discount on the $1 billion that Yahoo paid only six years before.

However, the last few years have not been smooth for Automattic. Last November, it emerged that Automattic was reducing it's efforts to overhaul Tumblr:

“After 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks”

However, Tumblr hosts over half a billion blogs. This is still a mammoth internet platform.

Now Automattic have announced that they're moving the whole platform to WordPress. This will be one of the largest migrations in internet history.

If Automattic can make this happen there will be substantial upsides for WordPress in general:

“Running Tumblr on WordPress will make it easier to share our work across platforms. We can build something once and bring it to both WordPress and Tumblr. We can run Tumblr on the rock-solid infrastructure behind WordPress.com. Tumblr will benefit from the collective effort that goes into the open source WordPress project. And WordPress will benefit from the tools and creativity we invest into Tumblr and contribute back to WordPress.”