Skip to main content

WordPress says Tumblr blogs galore exported in wake of Yahoo acquisition

tumblr yahoo acquisition
Image used with permission by copyright holder

WordPress founder Mike Mullenweg weighed in on the Tumblr-Yahoo deal by noting that WordPress saw a big spike in blogs exported from Tumblr.

Mullenweg detailed the jump on his blog: “Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: Normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.”

That’s a massive increase – does it mean that Tumblr is going down?

Yahoo sealed the deal with Tumblr this weekend, purchasing the beloved blogging service for $1.1 billion and instigating thousands of speculative blog posts (including our own rather skeptical take, admittedly). Tumblr fans are worried that the Yahoo old guard will contaminate their platform, and that this purchase will inevitably result in a substantial increase in ads and marketing materials on Tumblr.

It’s too soon to tell whether Yahoo will drag Tumblr into the uncool muck or whether Tumblr will inject a little hipness into Yahoo, but these fears are entirely founded. Tumblr needs to crank monetization up a notch – it’s already been working on improving mobile ads – and the Yahoo acquisition will give the Tumblr team access to a larger advertising team. So yes, there will be more ads on Tumblr.

And of course, users don’t like change. They are rejecting Yumblr in a way similar to how Instagrammers rejected its acquisition by Facebook

This initial jolt doesn’t mean Tumblr is doomed. After all, people always lose their minds when a favorite smaller service gets snatched up by a larger one. After all, Instagram is doing better than ever, with over 100 million users

72,000 seems like a massive number, and if that amount of people continued to jump ship every hour this week, Tumblr would definitely be in a pickle. But this is a one-time reaction to news, not the result of any negative changes that have happened on Tumblr yet. If the Yahoo acquisition results in a feature that users really, really hate, there may be an exodus, but it won’t be as rapid-fire.

If Mullenweg hadn’t pointed out this unusual increase, Tumblr may not have even noticed that it happened with all of the commotion that’s happening at their offices – they get 82 million blog posts a day, so that 72,000 is just a teensy slice of the blog pie.

So basically, Tumblr is going to lose some die-hard fans who resist change. That’s inevitable. But there won’t be a real, sustained loss in users unless Yahoo actually starts ruining it.

Topics
Kate Knibbs
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
How to download Instagram photos (5 easy ways)
Instagram app running on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Instagram is amazing, and many of us use it as a record of our lives — uploading the best bits of our trips, adventures, and notable moments. But sometimes you can lose the original files of those moments, leaving the Instagram copy as the only available one . While you may be happy to leave it up there, it's a lot more convenient to have another version of it downloaded onto your phone or computer. While downloading directly from Instagram can be tricky, there are ways around it. Here are a few easy ways to download Instagram photos.

Read more
X seems to have deleted years of old Twitter images
The new X sign replacing the Twitter logo on the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter and recently rebranded as X appears to be having trouble showing images posted on the site between 2011 and 2014.

The issue came to widespread attention on Saturday when X user Tom Coates noted how the famous selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars in 2014, which quickly broke the “most retweets” record, was no longer displaying. Later reports suggested the image had been restored, though, at the time of writing, we’re not seeing it.

Read more
X says it’s squashing the bug that deleted Twitter images and links
The new X sign replacing the Twitter logo on the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

X, formerly known as Twitter, says it’s working to restore potentially millions of images and links that suddenly and rather mysteriously disappeared from the platform in recent days.

“Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014,” the company said in a post on its Support account on Monday. “No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.”

Read more