six years after a billion dollar valuation, tumblr sold for 3 million

Blogging platform Tumblr was valued at over one billion dollars when Yahoo acquired it in 2013. Now, six years later and with Yahoo’s former assets snapped up by Verizon Media Group, Tumblr has been sold off to WordPress for a miniscule three million.

The collapse of the platform’s value is tied to a long history of mismanagement by companies never quite sure how to capitalize on an internet blogging service populated heavily by the millennial audience.

Tumblr as a service is comparable to Instagram, leaning heavily on image posting to supplement a more basic blogging platform. It was heavily populated by artists and niche communities, many of which involved adult content of varying nature.

Last year, Verizon’s management declared a ban on adult content on the platform, a decision with extreme backlash among the userbase that led to a collapse of web traffic to the site and spawned several rival platforms as those communities simply abandoned Tumblr entirely.

Verizon’s buyouts of both AOL and Yahoo in recent years left them with little in the way of returns, with the group last year writing off as lost $4.6 billion of their $10 billion investment in the various properties. 

Staff cuts and attempts to use technology for moderation to save money only created more issues, with Tumblr’s adult content filter being notoriously broad and marking users’ image uploads as ‘adult’ seemingly at random regardless of content.