US telecommunications company Verizon is selling its ownership of Tumblr over to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The sale of the social media platform comes nearly two years after Verizon’s purchase of it from Yahoo back in 2017.
The price that Automattic is paying for the microblogging site is a bit surprising as well; the company is reportedly only paying less than US$3 million (~RM12.58 million) for the site. It’s a shocking drop in value, especially when you recall that Yahoo initially paid US$1.1 billion (~RM4.61 billion) for it back in 2013.
What Automattic intends to do with its new acquisition is still a mystery, but the more pressing and obvious question is why the WordPress owner even bought it. While Tumblr was once a massively popular outlet for blogging and social media, the platform lost its lustre over time to other social media outlets. Including Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
However, Tumblr did run into other problems as recently as last year, when it struggled to rein in and control the distribution of adult content and pornography on the platform. The Indonesian government had banned the platform from being used. Then, back in December last year, Tumblr announced that it would be banning any pornographic content from being posted on its platform.
(Source: WSJ via The Verge, Axios)
