At the wordCamp Canada 2025 conference, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, frankly admitted that the customer acquisition deal was the bigest failure of his career.
According to Mullenweg, Tumblr is still operating on a technical system other than WordPress. He plans to move the entire back-end of Tumblr to WordPress infrastructure to save costs and simplify maintenance.
However, that plan was delayed by the huge amount of data with more than 500 million blogues and high travel costs, while Tumblr is currently unprofessional.
This is a big step forward. 0.0mlcs operating costs are much higher than the revenue it generates, Mullenweg said.
To maintain operations, Automattic has cut staff and reallocated resources to departments with higher profits, but the results are not as expected.
However, Mullenweg still sees this as an opportunity to make amends: Maybe this is the biggest failure or opportunity I have ever missed, but we are still looking for a way to fix it.
If the transition to the WordPress platform is successful, Tumblr will not only save costs but also be able to participate in fediverse, an open social network where platforms can interact with each other.
During the meeting, Mullenweg also revealed many more projects that automattic is developing, including WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Playground (allowing WordPress to run completely on the browser) and the multi-platform voiceover beeper.
Mullenweg said beeper is expanding to connect with services like KakaoTalk and even a dating app.
Referring to artificial intelligence, Mullenweg commented that AI is an irreversible trend. Mullenweg also revealed a plan to label AI-generated images in a WordPress interface warehouse to make it easier for users to filter content as needed.
The CEO of Automattic expressed his belief that Tumblr could revive if it were integrated further into the WordPress ecosystem, where he created one of the world's largest open platforms.
