Beginnings (2006–2012)

 

 

Tumblr (original logo shown) was founded by David Karp (left) and Marco Arment (right).

Development of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between contracts at David Karp‘s software consulting company, Davidville.Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs, hence the name Tumblr)for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As none had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own platform.Tumblr was launched in February 2007, and within two weeks had gained 75,000 users. Arment left the company in September 2010 to wo on Instapaper.

In June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in collaboration with Adidas, who launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought ad placements on the user dashboard. This launch came only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site.Ownership by Yahoo! (2013–2018)

On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! Inc. to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Many of Tumblr’s users were unhappy with the news, causing some to start a petition, achieving nearly 170,000 signatures.^[15] David Karp remained CEO and the deal was finalized on June 20, 2013. Advertising sales goals were not met and in 2016 Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr’s value.

Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo in June 2017, and placed Yahoo and Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary.Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be leaving Tumblr by the end of the year. Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr’s president and COO, took over leading the company.The site, along with the rest of the Oath division (renamed Verizon Media Group in 2019), continued to struggle under Verizon. In March 2019, SimilarWeb estimated Tumblr had lost 30% of its user traffic since December 2018, when the site had introduced a stricter content policy with heavier restrictions on adult content (which had been a notable draw to the service). In May 2019, it was reported that Verizon was considering selling the site due to its continued struggles since the purchase (as it had done with another Yahoo property, Flickr, via its sale to SmugMug). Following this news, Pornhub‘s vice president publicly expressed interest in purchasing Tumblr, with a promise to reinstate the previous adult content policies.

Automattic (2019–present)

On August 12, 2019, Verizon Media announced that it would sell Tumblr to Automattic, the operator of blog service WordPress.com and corporate backer of the open source blog software of the same name. The sale was for an undisclosed amount, but Axios reported that the sale price was less than $3 million, less than a hundredth of Yahoo’s original purchase price. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that the site will operate as a complementary service to WordPress.com, and that there were no plans to reverse the content policy decisions made during Verizon ownership.

In November 2022, Mullenweg stated that Tumblr will add support for the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub. The next month, Tumblr launched a livestreaming service called Tumblr Live. Tumblr Live is an adapted version of The Meet Group‘s product Livebox.

In November of 2023, most of Tumblr’s product development and marketing teams were transferred to other groups within Automattic. Mullenweg stated that focus would shift to core functionality and streamlining existing features.