Tumblr is in trouble. Recent efforts to turn things around at the blogging site have fallen flat, which will result in a 2024 re-org.
"What's super clear is our previous approach wasn't working," Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, said in a recent post. "It didn't turn around the business to make enough money to support the investment of infrastructure and staff needed to run Tumblr, and a lot of users were unhappy with some of the changes we tried."
Starting on Jan. 1, 2024, "we'll try a different structure with smaller, more focused teams working on the core parts of Tumblr that people say they want improved. We'll sunset or rollback some things we tried that didn't work."
Automattic acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019, but in the years since, "we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have the revenue and usage above its previous peaks," Mullenwag wrote in a leaked memo, as reported by The Verge.
Efforts like the Patreon-esque Post+ created more headaches than revenue thanks to confusion over copyrights, Mullenwag said in a separate post. Other programs like Blaze, which lets people pay to promote posts, and Ad-free, which lets users turn off ads for $4.99 per month, are "doing well," Mullenwag says, "but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries."
Also on the chopping block: Tumblr Live, a live-streaming service launched in 2022. It's among the "extra things that were launched...that haven't gotten the adoption we hoped," he says.
As a result, Automattic is shuffling around its personnel. Most of the Bumblr team, which is Tumblr's product team, is being repositioned within the company while other staff is encouraged to submit a ranked list of other things around the company that they would be interested in doing. For now, the customer support and trust and safety, called Happiness and T&S in the memo, respectively, are not changing.
Tumblr was struggling prior to the Automattic update, particularly after it banned NSFW content in 2018, which prompted a huge drop in traffic. Last year, it started allowing nudity again but not porn over fears it would face a crackdown from credit card companies and Apple over their attempts to stop child sex abuse imagery.
