Automattic’s CEO calls Tumblr its “biggest failure” yet

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has called the company’s acquisition of Tumblr his biggest failure — but he’s not giving up on it just yet. He made these comments recently Word Camp Canada 2025 The conference, where Mullenweg was live-streamed in a Town Hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community.

The CEO noted that Tumblr still uses a different technology stack than WordPress, something he intended to correct Back-end migration To the WordPress infrastructure. However, this was a huge project stack Earlier this year, as the cost of moving Tumblr’s half a billion blogs It would be difficult since the blogging platform was not profitable and was still supported by the profits of Automattic’s other products.

The company tried to reduce costs With layoffs and reallocate Tumblr’s resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to bear fruit.

Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his town hall session, saying, “I need to convert[Tumblr]to WordPress, but this is a big push. It’s actually over 500 million blogs, and as a business, it costs a lot more to run than it generates in revenue.”

As a result, Automattic was forced to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable.

He added: “This may be my biggest failure or missed opportunity at the moment, but we are still working on it.”

If Tumblr moves to the WordPress backend, it will be simpler and more cost-effective to maintain. In addition, it will enable the service to do more Join the open social network known as fediversewhich was supposed to be one of the WordPress migration features.

During his talk, Mullenweg discussed other ongoing projects at the company, including WordPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. He mentioned a playground, which lets you Run WordPress entirely in a web browserAnd automatic Beeper global messaging app. The latter will be expanded to include bridge support to other messaging apps, such as KakaoTalk and messaging services from dating apps, he said.

He also touched on AI, saying, “We’re not putting the genie back in the bottle” with the technology, and described companies like OpenAI as “too big to fail.” One line of work, the WordPress theme directory, is considering tagging AI-generated images to allow people to filter their searches appropriately, rather than rejecting AI-generated themes.

Notably, Mullenweg answered a question about Legal drama with WP Enginea WordPress hosting company invited by Automattic to take advantage of the open source ecosystem without returning the favor. In response to a question from the audience about bad actors exploiting society, Mullenweg responded that he “didn’t want to say there are bad actors,” but rather “bad deeds.”

He suggested that Automattic create more incentive systems to encourage contributions and other good behaviors, such as giving some people higher rankings in the WordPress directory or showcase. He also encouraged the community to “vote with your wallet” by not supporting companies that aren’t doing the right thing.

“There’s a site called WordPressEngineTracker.com that’s currently tracking the number of sites that have left a particular host. It’s about to cross 100,000 sites…that have switched to other hosts, and there have been 74,000 sites that have been offline since September of last year,” he said.

The court ordered the site’s removal at one point, with Mullenweg telling the crowd they were “trying to muzzle freedom of expression and transparency.”