Historically, Tumblr has been somewhat of a competitor of WordPress.com. For those that use it, understand there is definitly a difference between the two, but as WordPress has done more to tighten up their ecosystem with liking posts and keeping sign-in simple when leaving comments, the two platforms have grown closer to together.
This past Sunday, the news about Yahoo! acquiring Tumblr for the tune of $1.1 billion (who knew they had that much!) was blazing around the web, Tumblr users were found jumping ship.
You can probably guess what ship they were found jumping, to.
WordPress.com
Matt Mullenweg commented on the exodus on his blog, Sunday, saying:
“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.”
Dang.
That’s a crap load of imports.
Now that the deal has been sealed, I would be curious to know if this is still trending.
The Future of Tumblr Users
I’m sure as the future of Tumblr hangs in the balance, a rock-hard space like WordPress.com (and WordPress.org) is looking pretty appealing right now. In fact, Yahoo has already gave us some ideas what they’re planning on doing with Tumblr:
“On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience.”
Maybe they’ll do this in a way that doesn’t rock the boat, but I’m thinking there will be plenty who won’t sit around to find out. Would you?
When you consider what many online giants have done lately, Instagram and Facebook with their terms of service and with Twitter killing Posterous, the Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr is sure to make many users scatter.
Tumblr’s loss may be WordPress’ gain.
What do you think?
[via TechCrunch]
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