Verizon Media Group announced on August 12 (local time) that it has agreed to sell its affiliate Tumblr to Automattic. Transaction terms are not disclosed. According to US Axios, the total purchase price is “much lower” than $20 million.
Automattic runs the open-source blogging tool WordPress.com. Automattic only explained adding Tumblr to a lineup of services such as WordPress.com and Jetpack after the acquisition was completed.
Tumblr is a blog service founded in 2007. It was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 for about $ 1.1 billion, and Verizon was acquired in 2016 by Verizon. Founder David Carp retired in 2017. According to Verizon Media, there are currently 475 million blogs on Tumblr.
Verizon Media has HuffPost, TechCrunch, Engadget, AOL, Yahoo, and others. In April 2018, it sold its photo-sharing service Flickr to SmugMug.