The telecommunications giant Verizon, which owned the popular social media platform Tumblr, has sold off the blogging service at a loss of more than $1 billion compare to what Yahoo! paid for Tumblr six years ago, according to a report by the news site Axios. Verizon acquired Yahoo! in 2017.
Tumblr had long been a haven for adult content creators who were shut out of other social media platforms due to prohibitions on porn and explicit sexual content. But as AVN.com reported, the welcoming atmosphere for sexual expression suddenly dried up last December, when Tumblr banned porn after a series of controversies culminating in the Apple App Store removing the Tumblr app due to allegedly prohibited content.
But Tumblr's new owners Automattic, Inc. say that they plan to keep the porn ban in place, according to a Gizmodo report. The focus of the new owners will now be on integrating Tumblr into their online publishing system WordPress somehow.
Yahoo! is one of the longest-running search engine portals on the internet, first founded in 1994, predating Google by four years. But in the past decade, Yahoo! has struggled to find an identity, adding large amounts of content in an effort to pull in new online traffic. As part of that effort, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr in 2013 for a reported sticker price of $1.1 billion, according to AdWeek, in hopes that the blogging platform would bring a millennial audience along with it.
Verizon then purchased Yahoo! for $4.8 billion two years ago, a purchase that included Tumblr, whose value had been already written down by Yahoo! by $230 million.
But according to the Axios report, Verizon on Monday announced that it had reached a deal to sell Tumblr to Automattic, Inc., parent company of WordPress, which is the online publishing platform widely used to manage content on thousands of news and blogging sites.
Verizon did not announce a purchase price, but according to Axios, sources put the amount paid by Automattic at “below $10 million.” The technology news site The Verge reported that the price could be as low as $3 million, meaning that Yahoo! would have lost nearly its entire $1.1 billion investment in Tumblr.
Tumblr traffic plunged sharply after the porn ban, as AVN.com reported, but since has shown signs of recovering.
Photo By The Conmunity - Pop Culture Geek / Wikimedia Commons
