Founded 12 years, no profit. The value of Tumblr plummeted.
This Monday, US telecom operator Verizon announced that it will sell its light blog site Tumblr to Automattic. Automattic is the owner of the online publishing tool WordPress.
The two companies did not disclose the specific transaction amount. US tech mediaAxios reported that a source familiar with the deal said the transaction amount “well below $20 million”. Tumblr’s current price is even less than one-fifth of the time when it was first sold.
In 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo for more than $1 billion. In 2017, Verizon acquired Yahoo’s portal business, and Tumblr followed the second move and was included in Verizon. Verizon is a US telecommunications giant with more than 50 brands in its media business, including the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.
In contrast, the unprofitable Tumblr is only a small part of Verizon’s entire big business. Verizon started looking for buyers for Tumblr earlier this year, but as of May this year, porn site Pornhub is still the only bidder to publicly show interest in buying Tumblr.
If it is really acquired by Pornhub, Tumblr may be able to untie the “no porn” rope on his neck. But in the hands of Automattic, this ban has been confirmed to be retained.
Although Tumblr was once regarded as the future of Internet socialization, it not only attracted Obama to open an account for election canvassing, but also attracted a large number of imitators in China (spot network, Sina Qing, Netease LOFTER, everyone station, etc.). But these years have been much worse than before.
In January 2017, a paper published by Bell Labs on arXiv showed that a quarter of Tumblr users were directed at adult content. Therefore, For the already degraded Tumblr, the sudden anti-vice in December 2018 is equivalent to suicide.
In December last year, Tumblr officially announced that it would permanently ban any pornographic content from December 17, 2018. The Community guidelines modify the terms that involve adult content: don’t upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real human genitals or female exposed nipples – this includes very realistic so that it can beCan be mistaken for the content of real humans. Do not upload any content that expresses sexual activity, including images, videos, GIF animations or drawings.
Before this, Tumblr’s standard for publishing content is, “Allow any content to be posted, but nudes, sexual acts, and art photos, photographic journals, etc. that contain nudity will be marked as restricted content. These are Pre-opened security mode masking, users can only view after logging in and actively turning off this mode.”
One month after the start of the scandal, Tumblr slipped from around 10 to 30 in the download list of social apps in the US. The company has more than 450 million blog accounts, but the company has long since released monthly active user data. According to eMarketer, at the beginning of this year, Tumblr was only about 21.3 million active users, and it has not grown for many years.
When Yahoo acquired Tumblr with a lot of money, Marisa Mayer, then CEO of Yahoo, posted on Tumblr promised that “we wouldn’t mess up,” but it turned out to be messed up. Tumblr has been slow to achieve profitability goals, and the parent company has suffered several rounds of heavy losses. Later, this hot potato fell into the hands of Verizon, and the same could not stop the depreciation trend. Last year, Verizon underweighted its online portal business, including Tumblr, by about half the value of its business.
In the future, Tumblr’s future in Automattic is still unknown. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal that he would use Tumblr as a “companion” for WordPress and “Just fun.”
Matt Murenweg said that although the purchase price is not high, it is already the largest acquisition in the history of Automattic, both in terms of the amount and the number of employees involved. Tumblr’s current 200 employees will be absorbed by Automattic.