WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently responded to a leaked internal company memo on his Tumblr account .
The picture below is a screenshot of the leaked memo:
Matt first confirmed the authenticity of the content, but said it was incomplete, so he decided to publicly explain the specifics of the memo.
This memo discusses the next steps for Tumblr. Matt said that the vast majority of the 139 employees on Tumblr's product and marketing teams will be assigned to other departments, and employees in the customer support and service and trust and safety departments will stay and continue their original jobs.
This decision means that Tumblr has actually entered maintenance mode and will only ensure the most basic operations from now on.
Tumblr was founded in 2007, was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013, and was acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic in 2019 for only $3 million. Tumblr was once known for its large amount of adult content, but in December 2018 it announced that it would ban adult content. This move caused Tumblr's traffic to plummet and it lost a large number of users. Many people think that from this time on, if the soup is not hot, it is already cold.
Tumblr has struggled, and last November Automattic decided to allow artists to resume publishing adult content on Tumblr on a limited basis in hopes of bringing back users. But it awkwardly stated that artists were prohibited from profiting from adult content. So the artists and creators didn't come back, and neither did the users.
Matt said in the memo that in the four years after acquiring Tumblr, they invested approximately 200 full-time employees in the business and spent more than $100 million trying to turn around Tumblr's loss-making situation. But this goal has not yet been achieved. However, he said no employees would be laid off, and employees could take up positions in other departments, with each person able to list the three jobs they most wanted to do.
Further reading: WordPress founder says Tumblr will support ActivityPub protocol