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The once-great social media and blogging platform Tumblr has undergone a number of big changes in recent years, and another one is just around the corner. Parent company Automattic says it is migrating all Tumblr blogs – more than half a billion of them – to the WordPress backend.
In a blog post announcing the initiative this week, Automattic made it clear that the company is not planning to change anything about Tumblr's front-end user experience. “We love Tumblr's streamlined posting experience and current product direction. We will not change that,” a spokesperson wrote.
In terms of user experience, the two blogging platforms have very different focuses. WordPress is meant to be powerful, customizable, and extensible to meet a variety of needs, while Tumblr is meant to streamline the experience, providing something of a middle ground between running a WordPress blog and using something like X or Threads.
The plan is to move to the WordPress backend so that Automattic can develop features that can be deployed to Tumblr and WordPress blogs simultaneously. This will allow Tumblr to tap into the robust existing WordPress.com infrastructure and make it easier to leverage the open source work being done on WordPress to improve Tumblr.
Automattic's post did not provide a timeline, acknowledging only that this will be “one of the largest technical migrations in the history of the Internet.”
Automattic acquired Tumblr in a modest fire sale for just $3 million – a far cry from the $1 billion the platform was worth to Yahoo not so many years ago. Yahoo acquired Tumblr back then to make it a competitor to Facebook, but didn't make the right decisions to achieve that – if it was even possible.
Since the acquisition, Automattic has reallocated staff and resources, shifting many Tumblr employees to other projects. However, the company says it plans to continue supporting Tumblr with new features in the future and that the migration is part of those plans.