More than 15 billion yen was spent to revive Tumblr, but it did not reach its peak and the management team was significantly reduced

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the technology company that owns the microblog Tumblr, announced a significant downsizing of the Tumblr management team. In addition, it has been revealed that Tumblr cost over 100 million dollars (about 15 billion yen).

Matt on Tumblr
https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/733551497286172672/

Tumblr is a microblogging service launched in 2007 that allows users to post text and images. The number of Tumblr posts exceeded 100 million in 2013, and it was acquired by Yahoo! for about $1.1 billion (170 billion yen) in the same year.

Yahoo! acquires Tumblr for over 110 billion yen - GIGAZINE

In 2018, a situation occurred in which ``Tumblr's iOS app was temporarily removed from the App Store due to child pornography content being handled on Tumblr.'' In response to this, Tumblr has announced a policy to strictly regulate adult content as a whole.

Tumblr announces ban on adult content - GIGAZINE

After that, Tumblr's performance continued to deteriorate, as it was reported that the number of visits decreased by about 30% just two months after the ban on adult content. In August 2019, Tumblr was acquired by Automattic, the company that operates WordPress.com . The transaction amount when acquired by Automattic is reported to be less than $ 20 million (approximately 3 billion yen), which is significantly lower than the acquisition amount by Yahoo!.

Blogging service Tumblr is acquired by WordPress' parent company - GIGAZINE

Additionally, on November 10, 2023, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced a significant reduction in the Tumblr management team. Specifically, the majority of the 139 employees in the Tumblr operations department, known internally as 'Bumblr,' will be transferred to other departments, while the customer support team and bot and spam countermeasures team will remain the same. He will remain in the Tumblr management department. The transfer is expected to take effect on December 31, 2023.

CEO Mullenweg acknowledged that Tumblr has invested far more than $100 million (approximately 15 billion yen) to improve its profitability, but said, ``Since acquiring Tumblr in 2019, Tumblr has added 600 people , ``However, we have not achieved our goal of ``earning more revenue than at our peak,'''' he said. It has been revealed that this was the cause of the personnel change.

In addition, before the transfer on December 31, 2023, members of the Tumblr management department are being asked to respond to a survey to select the ``Top 3 Automattic products they would like to work on next.''

A forum related to this article has been set up on the GIGAZINE official Discord server. Anyone can write freely, so please feel free to comment!

• Discord | 'Have you been using Tumblr lately? When was the last time you used it?' | GIGAZINE
https://discord.com/channels/1037961069903216680/1173550548591591464