Automattic’s CEO calls Tumblr its “biggest failure” yet

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has called the company’s acquisition of Tumblr his biggest failure — but he’s not giving up on it just yet. These comments were presented at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg was broadcast in a Town Hall session to engage with the open source-focused WordPress community.

The CEO noted that Tumblr still uses a different technology stack than WordPress — something he intended to correct by migrating the backend to the WordPress infrastructure. However, this massive project was put on hold earlier this year, as the cost of moving Tumblr’s half a billion blogs would be difficult given that the blogging platform was not profitable and continues to be subsidized by profits from Automattic’s other products.

The company has tried to cut costs by laying off workers and reallocating Tumblr’s resources to more profitable parts of the business, but these efforts have yet to bear fruit.

Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his town hall session, saying: “I need to switch [Tumblr] to WordPress, but it’s a big boost. It’s actually over 500 million blogs, and as a business, it costs a lot more to run than it generates in revenue.

As a result, Automattic was forced to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable.

He added: “This may be my biggest failure or missed opportunity at the moment, but we are still working on it.”

If Tumblr moves to the WordPress backend, it will be simpler and more cost-effective to maintain. Additionally, it will enable the service to further join the open social web known as the fediverse, which was supposed to be one of the benefits of the WordPress migration.

During his talk, Mullenweg discussed other ongoing projects at the company, including 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 latter will be expanded to include bridge support to other messaging apps, such as KakaoTalk and messaging services from dating apps, he said.

He also touched on AI, saying, “We’re not putting the genie back in the bottle” with the technology, and described companies like OpenAI as “too big to fail.” One line of work, the WordPress theme directory, is considering tagging AI-generated images to allow people to filter their searches appropriately, rather than rejecting AI-generated themes.

Notably, Mullenweg answered a question about the legal drama with WP Engine, the WordPress hosting company that Automattic called out for taking advantage of the open source ecosystem without returning the favor. In response to a question from the audience about bad actors exploiting society, Mullenweg responded that he “didn’t want to say there are bad actors,” but rather “bad deeds.”

He suggested that Automattic create more incentive systems to encourage contributions and other good behaviors, such as giving some people higher rankings in the WordPress directory or showcase. He also encouraged the community to “vote with your wallet” by not supporting companies that aren’t doing the right thing.

“There’s a site called WordPressEngineTracker.com that’s currently tracking the number of sites that have left a particular host. It’s about to cross 100,000 sites…that have switched to other hosts, and there have been 74,000 sites that have been offline since September of last year,” he said.

The court ordered the site’s removal at one point, with Mullenweg telling the crowd they were “trying to muzzle freedom of expression and transparency.”