Less Than a Year After Adult Content Ban, Wordpress Buys Tumblr for $3 Million

Once considered one of the crown jewels of social media, Tumblr has had a rough year. Last December, users, fans and creators fled the site en masse, following a controversial ban on female nipples, genitalia and sex acts, effectively known as the Tumblr Porn Ban. But the de-porning was just the beginning.

Yesterday, Wordpress owners, Automattic, announced the purchase of Tumblr for $3.3 million. Considering Yahoo bought the site for $1.1 billion, the loss is staggering. Verizon, Yahoo's owner, lost nearly a $1 billion dollars on the sale.

congrats to tumblr on being worth less than this one fish pic.twitter.com/4FO2whfWkv

— unlicensed professional (@KrangTNelson) August 13, 2019

I am extremely upset that no one told us Tumblr was for sale for an amount we could have Kickstarted https://t.co/9eNRAIhfgY

— Adrienne Porter Felt (@__apf__) August 13, 2019

Wordpress seems pretty happy about how little Tumblr's clearance price. Automattic chief executive Matt Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal that they would make Tumblr a bit of a trifle.

"It’s just fun," he said of Tumblr. "We’re not going to change any of that."

But Tumblr fans really only want to know one thing: The porn, darling.

Give tumblr their porn back

— degen central (@jaberwockyflame) August 12, 2019

Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr
Verizon removed the porn
Automattic paid <$3 million

So Tumblr Porn is worth ~$1,097,000,000

— Anna Lytical 🌈👩🏻‍💻👸🏻 in SF (@theannalytical) August 13, 2019

Well, the answer is pretty much a no. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mullenweg said that the company would uphold the current adult content ban.

Mullenweg, instead, promises to make Tumblr an accenting website to Wordpress, which is effectively what Tumblr was created to oppose.

In 2011, Tumblr founder David Karp told .net magazine, "I had all these cool videos, links and projects that I wanted to put out there, and I had a really hard time doing it. I wanted to do something different. I was determined not to compete with WordPress."