At WordCamp Canada 2025, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called Tumblr his “biggest failure,” noting the challenge of maintaining the platform’s half a billion blogs while it remains unprofitable. Though plans to migrate Tumblr to WordPress infrastructure are on hold, Mullenweg said he hasn’t given up.

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Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg acknowledged Tumblr as his biggest failure, citing the platform's unprofitability despite hosting over 500 million blogs. Plans to migrate Tumblr to WordPress infrastructure remain on hold due to high costs and the platform's inability to generate sufficient revenue. The company has attempted cost-cutting through layoffs and resource reallocation, but Tumblr continues to be sustained by profits from other Automattic products. Mullenweg also discussed ongoing projects including WordPress Playground, Beeper messaging app expansion, and the ongoing legal dispute with WP Engine over open source contributions.

Automattic CEO calls Tumblr his ‘biggest failure’ so far

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I didn’t know that Tumblr and <a href="http://WordPress.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">WordPress.com</a> are owned by the same company. Even though I don’t use Tumblr much, I think it’s a great platform to share or promote your content.

The dark truth is that tumblr was most popular platform for NSFW content. In 2018 they decided to ban all adult only content and they massively turned off all accounts with that content. How it ended, we know: almost nobody is using tumblr now, because for regular content, there are more known alternatives with better market shares.

Wow. MM is actually admitting failure? That’s genuinely surprising.