Tumblr - from $1.1B to $3M Valuation
Tumblr tumbles - from 1.1B to $3m in six years. Hope the new owner can spell it better "Tumbler". Yes, that can help as the name "Tumblr" irritates. Creative destruction now playing on market stages across the world!
Verizon, continuing to "optimize" its media portfolio, is selling blogging site Tumblr to Wordpress owner Automattic, for less than $3 million. Yahoo, which Verizon picked up for $4.5 billion, bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013.
Axios reported that Automattic purchased Tumblr, which launched in 2007, for “well below” $20 million; Axios business editor Dan Primack added in a tweet that the sale price was in fact below $3 million, and Recode’s Peter Kafka tells Vox that sources say the actual figure is closer to $2 million. That’s a very long way down from Yahoo’s infamous $1.1 billion purchase of the website in 2013. (Verizon subsumed Tumblr when it acquired Yahoo in 2017.)
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
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From the moment Yahoo started going downhill, anything it touched, misfortune followed it; Tumblr is part of the also rans.
Automattic may really have to spell the name correctly, let it be 'Tumbler', at least to have some respect, because most people wouldn't want to break a tumbler...
But again, Twitter and Instagram have essentially taken care of whatever Tumblr is bringing to the market, so basically there is nothing to do.
Maybe in the next five years we are likely to have a major convergence amongst the social media platforms, with category king in each segment absorbing the strugglers and also rans within the bucket.