The sale was for an undisclosed amount, but Axios reported that the sale price was less than $3 million, a significant decrease over Yahoo's original purchase price. On August 12, 2019, Verizon Media announced that it would sell Tumblr to Automattic, the operator of blog service and corporate backer of the open source blog software of the same name. Following this news, Pornhub's vice president publicly expressed interest in purchasing Tumblr, with a promise to reinstate the previous adult content policies. In May 2019, it was reported that Verizon was considering selling the site due to its continued struggles since the purchase (as it had done with another Yahoo property, Flickr, via its sale to SmugMug). In March 2019, SimilarWeb estimated Tumblr had lost 30% of its user traffic since December 2018, when the site had introduced a stricter content policy with heavier restrictions on adult content (which had been a notable draw to the service). The site, along with the rest of the Oath division (renamed Verizon Media Group in 2019), continued to struggle under Verizon. Jeff D'Onofrio, Tumblr's president and COO, took over leading the company. Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be leaving Tumblr by the end of the year. Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo in June 2017, and placed Yahoo and Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary. Advertising sales goals were not met and in 2016 Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr's value. David Karp remained CEO and the deal was finalized on June 20, 2013. Many of Tumblr's users were unhappy with the news, causing some to start a petition, achieving nearly 170,000 signatures. to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! Inc. This launch came only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site. In June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in collaboration with Adidas, who launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought ad placements on the user dashboard. Arment left the company in September 2010 to work on Instapaper. Tumblr was launched in February 2007, and within two weeks had gained 75,000 users. As none had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own platform.

Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs, hence the name Tumblr) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. Tumblr (original logo shown) was founded by David Karp (left) and Marco Arment (right).ĭevelopment of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between contracts at David Karp's software consulting company, Davidville.

New tumblr blog