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Businesses The Almighty Buck The Internet Verizon Yahoo!

Verizon To Sell Tumblr To WordPress Owner (wsj.com) 18

Posted by BeauHD from the pass-the-baton dept.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Verizon has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013, and was later included in Verizon's $4.5 billion purchase of Yahoo's web assets in 2017. Bloomberg reports: Automattic Inc. will buy Tumblr for an undisclosed sum and take on about 200 staffers, the companies said. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art, but it has been dwarfed by Facebook, Reddit and other services. The Tumblr acquisition is the largest ever in terms of price and head count for Automattic, the company's Chief Executive Matt Mullenweg said in an interview. The San Francisco company has a stable of brands focused on online publishing, including longform site Longreads, comment-filtering service Akismet, and avatar-managing service Gravatar.

Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. "It's just fun," he said of Tumblr. "We're not going to change any of that." Tumblr has a strong mobile interface and dashboard where users follow other blogs, he said. Executives will look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.
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Verizon To Sell Tumblr To WordPress Owner More

Verizon To Sell Tumblr To WordPress Owner

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  • Wordpress would like to thank Verizon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mal-2 ( 675116 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:01PM (#59080346) Homepage Journal

    Wordpress would like to thank Verizon for shooting Tumblr in the foot, alienating 30% of its user base and traffic, taking the financial hit, and then selling the division off.

    Pornhub was prepared to buy Tumblr and put it back the way it was, and now there's bdsmlr, so it's exceptionally unlikely the divide will ever close again.

  • If your OS is not up to date, WordPress will force auto-updating for your own protection.
    • How could a process running as user "nobody" force an update on my system? Are you saying you run Wordpress as root? Anyway, I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on setting up and maintaining Wordpress. There are more useful things you can do with your time. We still need to support some Wordpress sites for our customers but we never recommend it. Wordpress sites are segregated behind several intrusion detection systems and firewalls and I can't image running such sites without them.
      • He is referring to how Wordpress does forced updates of the Wordpress install, not the OS. Of course, they could force you to choose to either update your OS or have Tumblr disabled, but that isn't what he was talking about. See also "rhetoric."
        • Strange, I guess we have different English comprehension faculties, here is what he wrote again:

          If your OS is not up to date, WordPress will force auto-updating for your own protection.

          • We don't have different English comprehension, but only one of us has the ability to comprehend sarcasm. To be fair, if you don't have Wordpress knowledge you might not pick up on the sarcasm. Luckily, somebody was nice enough to explain it, but unfortunately you are too stupid to figure out you are stupid so you got snarky instead of learning something. Off you go now ...

  • Adult content (Score:5, Informative)

    by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @05:32PM (#59080748)

    Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content.

    That's what killed Tumblr traffic and users

    After the porn ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised -- Tumblr has lost 30 percent of web traffic since December [theverge.com]

    • They basically aren't enforcing that rule, as near as I can tell. I would take him at his word, but also I think they know it isn't worth their time to police anything but illegal content. In other words, exactly what should have been happening all along.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dougman ( 908 )

        Agreed. There was certainly a downturn for a few months - some good accounts lost, a prolonged absence of adult postings as people felt out the new rules, but in the past couple of months there has been a resurgence of adult content, Lately I'm enjoying this app on my phone more than ever. I really don't understand the algos because they appear to be more human than automated in my experience.

        While I still enjoy my daily fix of adult content on Tumblr, I have actually found some other very interesting (non

      • They have an abysmally bad AI to identify "offensive" images. It has a tendency of spotting pornographic content in wholesome family pictures, gentle landscapes and geometric abstract art. OTOH porn spambots are as healthy as ever.

    • That's what killed Tumblr traffic and users

      And devalued it from over $1 billion to less than $3 million.

  • WordPress is not owned by Automattic! (Score:3)

    by ewanm89 ( 1052822 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @07:35AM (#59082192) Homepage

    WordPress is developed by and the trademarks are owned by the WordPress Foundation, now yes the one of the co-founders of WordPress is also the founder, CEO and president of Automattic which run the hosting platform WordPress.com, but they are separate organisations and WordPress Foundation has other members and other representation and members from many more people than Automattic and its employees

    There is even a page on it on the WordPress website here [wordpress.org]

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