WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure — but one he hasn't given up on yet. The comments appeared recently WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg live-streamed a town hall session to connect with the open-source-focused WordPress community.
The executive noted that Tumblr was still on a different technical stack than WordPress — something he intended to improve by migrating the backend to the WordPress infrastructure. However, this massive undertaking was put on hold earlier this year because the cost of moving half a billion blogs onto Tumblr would be difficult, given that the blogging platform was not profitable and is still supported by profits from other Automattic products.
The company has tried to cut costs through layoffs and shifting Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have yet to pay off.
Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns during the town hall session, saying, “I have to switch (Tumblr) to WordPress, but it's a big change. It's actually over 500 million blogs, and it costs a lot more to run the company than it generates in revenue.”
As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable, he said.
“It's probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we're still working on it,” he added.
If Tumblr were to move to the WordPress backend, it would be simpler and cheaper to maintain. Additionally, it would enable the service to further join the open social network known as fediverse, which was intended to be one of the benefits of migrating to WordPress.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
During his speech, Mullenweg discussed other projects carried out in the company, including: in WordPress, Jetpack and WooCommerce. He mentioned Playground, which allows you to run WordPress entirely in a web browser, and Automattic's universal messaging app, Beeper. The latter will expand to support bridges to other messaging apps like KakaoTalk and messaging services from dating apps, he said.
He also touched on artificial intelligence, saying that with this technology “we won't put the genie back in the bottle” and calling companies like OpenAI “too big to fail.” One area of the business, the WordPress theme directory, is thinking about tagging AI-generated images to allow users to filter their searches appropriately, rather than discarding AI-generated themes.
Notably, Mullenweg responded to a question about the legal drama with WP Engine, a WordPress hosting company that Automattic called out for profiting from the open source ecosystem without giving anything back. In response to an audience question about bad actors exploiting the community, Mullenweg replied that he did not “mean to say that there are bad actors,” but rather “bad actions.”
He suggested that Automattic should create more incentive systems to encourage contributions and other good behavior, such as giving certain people higher rankings in the WordPress directory or showcase. He also encouraged the community to “vote with their wallets” by not supporting companies that are not doing the right thing.
“There is a site called WordPressEngineTracker.com that is currently tracking many sites that have left a particular host. It will soon exceed 100,000… that have switched to other hosts, and since last September 74,000 have gone offline,” he said.
A court ordered the site to be shut down at one point, which Mullenweg told the crowd was “trying to stifle free speech and transparency.”
