Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

WordPress’ Mullenweg Claims 72,000 Blogs Imported From Tumblr in Just One Hour on Sunday

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Despite largely anecdotal media speculation, it’s not clear how the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo for $1.1 billion will be greeted by users of the New York blogging service.

But rival blogging service WordPress’s founder Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog last night that WordPress imports from Tumblr on Sunday — after news of the deal had been broken by AllThingsD.com — had risen from a typical 400 to 600 blog posts an hour to more than 72,000.

Whoa!

That said, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Some users of Posterous fled the blogging service when Twitter bought it, and some Instagrammers huffed off when Facebook nabbed the photo-sharing site.

And, by comparison, Tumblr says it get 75 million blog posts per day — so 72,000 are just a drop in the ironic blogging ocean.

Plus, Mullenweg thinks the high price paid by the Silicon Valley Internet giant was low.

“I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years,” wrote Mullenweg.

Here’s his post:

It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B. The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (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.)

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company. I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.

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I’m a giant vat of creative juices.

— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo