WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently described the company’s acquisition of Tumblr as his biggest failure, though he has not given up on it yet. He made these comments during a Town Hall session at the WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where he connected with the open source-focused WordPress community.
Mullenweg explained that Tumblr remains on a different technical stack than WordPress. He had originally intended to correct this by migrating Tumblr’s back end to WordPress infrastructure. However, that massive project was put on hold earlier this year. The cost of moving Tumblr’s half a billion blogs proved too difficult because the blogging platform is not profitable and continues to be sustained by the profits from other Automattic products.
The company has tried to reduce costs through layoffs and by reallocating Tumblr resources to more profitable parts of the business, but those efforts have not yet paid off. Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns, stating that he needs to switch Tumblr over to WordPress, but it is a big lift. He confirmed it is over 500 million blogs and that, as a business, it costs much more to run than it generates in revenue.
As a result, Automattic had to prioritize other projects to make Tumblr sustainable. Mullenweg added that it is probably his biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but they are still working on it. If Tumblr were to move to the WordPress back end, it would be simpler and more cost effective to maintain. Additionally, it would allow the service to further join the open social web known as the fediverse, which was intended as one perk of the WordPress migration.
During his talk, Mullenweg also discussed other projects underway at the company, including work on WordPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. He mentioned Playground, which lets you run WordPress entirely in a web browser, and Automattic’s universal messaging app Beeper. He noted that Beeper will be expanding to include support for bridges to other messaging apps, like KakaoTalk and messaging services from dating apps.
He also shared his thoughts on AI, saying that we are not putting the genie back in the bottle with the technology and calling companies like OpenAI too big to fail. In one area of the business, the WordPress theme directory, he is considering tagging images made with AI to allow people to filter their searches appropriately, rather than rejecting AI-generated themes.
Notably, Mullenweg answered a question about the legal situation with WP Engine, a WordPress hosting company that Automattic has called out for profiting from the open source ecosystem without giving back. In response to an audience question about bad actors who exploit the community, Mullenweg responded that he did not want 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 your wallet by not supporting businesses that are not doing the right thing.
He referenced a site called WordPressEngineTracker.com which is currently tracking a number of sites that have left a certain host. He mentioned it is about to cross 100,000 sites that have switched to other hosts, and that 74,000 have gone offline since September of last year. He told the crowd that the court ordered the site taken down at one point, which he characterized as them trying to muzzle free speech and transparency.