Why Tumblr is migrating over 500 million blogs to WordPress
What's the story
Automattic, the parent company of social media and blogging platform Tumblr, has announced a significant change in its operational strategy. The company plans to migrate all Tumblr blogs, amounting to over half a billion, to the WordPress back end. This move is aimed at leveraging the infrastructure of WordPress.com and facilitating simultaneous feature deployment on both platforms.
Unchanged interface
User experience to remain a priority
Despite this significant back-end shift, Automattic assures that the front-end user experience on Tumblr will remain unchanged. The company stated, "We love Tumblr's streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We're not changing that." This move is designed to strike a balance between the powerful and customizable nature of WordPress, and Tumblr's simplified user experience. Automattic hasn't disclosed a specific timeline for this migration. However, the company acknowledged it'll be "one of the largest technical migrations in Internet history."
Acquisition impact
Automattic's acquisition and future plans for Tumblr
Automattic acquired Tumblr in a fire sale for just $3 million, a stark contrast to its previous valuation of $1 billion by Yahoo. Since the acquisition, Automattic has reallocated resources and employees from Tumblr to other projects. Despite these changes, the company assures continued support for Tumblr with new features in the future, as part of their of the platform's growth and development.
Advantages
Benefits and challenges of the migration
The migration to WordPress is expected to offer several benefits. It will enable Automattic's team to develop tools and features that work on both platforms, while allowing Tumblr to utilize open-source developments from WordPress.org. However, this move also presents a significant technical challenge due to the sheer volume of blogs hosted on Tumblr. Despite these hurdles, Automattic seems confident in its ability to successfully execute this migration.