At WordCamp Canada 2025, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called Tumblr his “biggest failure,” noting the challenge of maintaining the platform’s half-billion blogs while it remains unprofitable. Though plans to migrate Tumblr to WordPress infrastructure are on hold, Mullenweg said he hasn’t given up.
as a long time tumblr user it’s so very ironic to me that short after the 2018 porn ban you see the rise of fan sites, and still after that tumblr tried to monetise by adding tips, and various ways to pay your favourite bloggers and just… you already had users willing to post hot original porn, and later you had ways to monetise it, but no, they did it in the wrong order wtf
as a long time tumblr user it’s so very ironic to me that short after the 2018 porn ban you see the rise of fan sites, and still after that tumblr tried to monetise by adding tips, and various ways to pay your favourite bloggers and just… you already had users willing to post hot original porn, and later you had ways to monetise it, but no, they did it in the wrong order wtf
tumblr devs adding all sorts of useless monetization vs 1 xkit developer
To be fair, IF tumblr had added the tipping feature while porn was huge on the site, it might have became Onlyfans.
OF wasn’t always a porn site. It was trying to be a Patron that allowed adult content, but it became just a porn site.
I argue something similar would have happened to tumblr