WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s Tumblr acquisition its biggest mistake, but he’s not giving up yet. This comment was made at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg held a live town hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community.
The executive noted that Tumblr is still on a different technology stack than WordPress. This was something I was going to fix by moving the backend to WordPress infrastructure. However, this massive undertaking was postponed earlier this year because the cost of relocating Tumblr’s 500 million blogs would be difficult, given that Tumblr’s blogging platform is not profitable and continues to be sustained by profits from other Automattic products.
The company has been trying to cut costs by cutting staff and reallocating Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to pay off.
Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns during a City Hall session, saying: [Tumblr] Moving to WordPress is a big step forward. In fact, there are over 500 million blogs, and as a business, they cost far more to operate than they generate revenue. ”
As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable, he said.
“This is probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity at the moment, but we’re still working on it,” he added.
If Tumblr were to move to a WordPress backend, it would be easier and more cost-effective to maintain. Additionally, the service allows you to further participate in the open social web known as the fediverse, which is one of the perks of a WordPress migration.
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During his talk, Mullenweg discussed other projects underway at the company, including WordPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. He mentioned Playground, which runs WordPress completely in a web browser, and Beeper, Automattic’s universal messaging app. The latter will reportedly be expanded to include support for bridging to other messaging apps, such as KakaoTalk and the dating app’s messaging service.
He also touched on AI, saying, “We’re not putting the genie back in the bottle” when it comes to this technology, and calling companies like OpenAI “too big to fail.” One area of our business, the WordPress Theme Directory, is looking at tagging AI-generated images so that searches can be filtered appropriately, rather than rejecting AI-generated themes.
Notably, Mullenweg answered questions about the courtroom drama with WP Engine. WP Engine is a WordPress hosting company that Automattic is calling out for profiting from the open source ecosystem without giving anything back. In response to an audience question about bad actors exploiting communities, Mullenweg said he didn’t mean to say there are bad actors, but rather “bad acts.”
He suggested that Automattic should create more incentive systems to encourage contributions and other good behavior, such as giving certain people higher rankings in the WordPress directory or Showcase. He also encouraged the community to “vote with their wallets” by not supporting companies that aren’t doing the right thing.
“There’s a site called WordPressEngineTracker.com that currently tracks the number of sites that have left a particular host. The number of sites that have switched to other hosts is almost over 100,000, and there are 74,000 sites that have gone offline since September last year,” he said.
A court temporarily ordered the site to be taken down, but Mullenweg told the audience that they were “trying to interfere with free speech and transparency.”
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