It was just the other day when the folks over at The Verge shared a leaked memo from Automattic’s main man Matt Mullenweg under the subject “You Win or You Learn” and this memo was addressing the complications that they’ve encountered in their realm of products as it applies to Tumblr. I’ve shared the memo down below and will add some additional editorial after you’ve read it.
The Leaked Memo:
We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Hat tip.
It is better to have tried to summit the peak and failed than never to have tried at all. We have learned a ton on the journey, and honed skills we can use to approach other summits.
As we talked about in the past, it if doesn’t work we’ll have a backup plan and set up the business so we don’t need to let anyone go, we’ll just need to reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together. This plan is happening now: the majority of the 139 people in Bumblr will switch to other divisions. No plans of any switches in Happiness or T&S.
We assume the first choice for everyone working on Tumblr is to continue working on Tumblr, but we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on. To influse some Tumblr mojo.
*** end of leaked memo ***
Ken Pierce Media Thoughts: So IMHO this doesn’t seem to bode all that well for the users of the Tumblr network. Many of our tenured readers know that I used Tumblr to share PiercingMetal posts for a number of years before rebranding it to Ken Pierce Media in late 2020 before importing the whole thing into a WordPress for that outlet back in early 2021. While I’ve kept the Ken Pierce Media account active, it’s really only used to direct you to any of the sites where the longer content resides. Doing this didn’t cost me any more time as all I needed to do is click the box on my WordPress sites and have it publish to that Tumblr account as well. Though the Twitter and Instagram feeds are no longer integrated there I think that by the end of the year there should be more than 7K posts on our Official KPM Tumblr. If Automattic decides to sunset it, I will miss having it for brand but it will not impact me at all since the better feed of content is on that WordPress already. I think that if you’re one of those who are solely relying on this medium for your content you might want to get some planning on what your options are should Tumblr go away. Though I might be wrong, part of me feels that since it didn’t make Automattic any money and cost them so many people hours and resources and didn’t grow despite this, it cannot be long before we say goodbye. You might notice in the memo that staff was being reassigned to work on other things and he’s giving them a choice of three projects. While I liked Tumblr there are several shortcomings that I felt should have been addressed and were potentially easy ones to deliver for a user. There are no statistics and there are no means of seeing how many people are following brands that you like or seeing how many posts they have in their history. I am a techy sort and I like knowing stuff like that since it helps me gauge my own brand a little better. If one of the solutions that Automattic makes is to have Tumblr automatically roll these accounts over into WordPress I’d be forced to let our account go since I’m already in WordPress with Ken Pierce Media and its quite a vibrant presence already. If you’re using something like Blogspot as your main thing it might be useful but then your content would be the same and more decisions would need to be made. All of this made me recall my video from when I decided to import all of the Tumblr stuff into a then brand-new WordPress. I’ve embedded the video down below because it was interesting to do since I was importing the whole profile into the more functional and fluid online publishing tool. Thise who need to do similar can hire me to help them with theirs if need be because its a lot of work and preparation to do. It’s also a lot of editing in post which I wasn’t aware of when I started it all but I digress. Chime in down below with what you think about the whole matter and also add what steps you’d be taking if the alarm gets sounded that Tumblr will be heading for the sunset. See you next time, thanks as aways for reading.
Official: https://www.tumblr.com
KPM on Tumblr: http://kenpiercemedia.tumblr.com