WordPress Claims Thousands Of Tumblr Refugees Amidst Yahoo Buyout
You may have heard the news earlier this morning about Yahoo officially acquiring Tumblr for just north of one billion shekels, and as with any high-profile buyout like this, many users are going to feel resentment towards the service they've relied on for so long, and will eventually jump ship for open waters. It looks like a handful of Tumblr users are doing just that.
WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg claims that the average number of posts being imported into WordPress from Tumblr is usually around 400-600 posts per hour. However, with the recent rumblings of the possibility of Yahoo buying Tumblr that traveled through the airwaves yesterday, Mullenweg says that hourly number jumped to 72,000.
Of course, this is only a small fraction of posts that Tumblr sees on a day-to-day basis, with the service claiming around 75 million blog posts being created each day. You may remember when Facebook bought Instagram, and while a lot of users decided to quit the service after the acquisition, Instagram still remains of the most popular photo-sharing services around.
From this, it's probably safe to say that Tumblr will also still stay strong. Even if thousands of users abandon the service, there will be more new users to take their place. However, Mullenweg makes a good point about the future of Tumblr. It would've been interesting to see what Tumblr would have done over the next few years as an independent company, but it'll also be interesting to see what they do with their new resources from Yahoo.
Mullenweg believes we're "at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain," but he thinks that the value of Tumblr and similar publishing platforms will possibly be worth ten times more in the "coming years" compared to today, meaning that if Tumblr waited just a few more years, today's deal would've been worth way more than a measly $1.1 billion.
VIA: AllThingsD
SOURCE: Matt Mullenweg