Automattic CEO calls Tumblr his ‘biggest failure’ so far

Summary

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure — but one he hasn’t given up on yet. The comments were made at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg went live for a Town Hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community. The exec noted that Tumblr was still on a different technical stack than WordPress — something he had intended to correct by migrating the back end to WordPress infrastructure. However, that massive undertaking was put on hold earlier this year, as the cost to move Tumblr’s half a billion blogs would be difficult given that the blogging platform wasn’t profitable and continues to be sustained by the profits of other Automattic products. The company has tried to trim costs with layoffs and the reallocation of Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to pay off. Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his Town Hall session, saying, “I need to switch [Tumblr] over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and, as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue.” As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable, he said. “It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it,” he added. If Tumblr were to move to the WordPress back end, it would be simpler and more cost effective to maintain. Plus, it would enable the service to further join the open social web known as the fediverse, which was to be one perk of the WordPress migration. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 During the course of his talk, Mullenweg discussed the other projects underway at the company, including at WordPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. He mentioned, Playground, which lets you run WordPress entirely in a web browser and Automattic’s universal messaging app Beeper. The latt...