Does Tumblr Still Exist? Yes, but It’s a Very Different Place in 2026
Does Tumblr still exist? Yes. It's online and owned by Automattic, but its audience has shrunk and it still loses money. Here's what Tumblr is like in 2026.
Yes, Tumblr still exists. As of October 2026 the website and apps are running, and it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It is far smaller than in its early-2010s heyday: Automattic’s own transparency report puts Tumblr’s average monthly EU audience below 22.5 million, and CEO Matt Mullenweg has said it still loses money.
So the platform is alive. The harder questions are why it shrank, who pays for it and whether it has a future.
Who owns Tumblr now?
Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon in August 2019. Terms weren’t disclosed, but multiple sources told Axios the price was around $3 million, and Automattic took on roughly 200 Tumblr staff.
That sale capped one of the steepest value drops in internet history.
| When | What happened | Dollar figure |
|---|---|---|
| May 2013 | Yahoo buys Tumblr | $1.1 billion |
| Early 2016 | Yahoo’s first writedown | $230 million |
| July 2016 | Second writedown | $482 million |
| 2017 | Verizon buys Yahoo; Tumblr comes with it | Not priced separately |
| August 2019 | Verizon sells to Automattic | About $3 million (reported) |
Run the numbers and Automattic paid less than 0.3% of Yahoo’s price. The real cost was payroll: a source told Axios that Automattic’s costs after closing would run around 20 times the purchase price.
What happened to Tumblr?
Three things did most of the damage.
Yahoo never made it pay
Yahoo bought Tumblr for its young, creative audience, then struggled to sell ads against it. CEO Marissa Mayer had projected $100 million in Tumblr revenue for 2015, and Yahoo’s CFO later admitted the business didn’t deliver. By mid-2016, Yahoo had written off $712 million of the $1.1 billion price.
The 2018 adult content ban
In late 2018, Apple pulled Tumblr’s app from the App Store after child sexual abuse material was found on the platform. Tumblr responded with a sweeping ban on adult content that took effect on December 17, 2018.
Visits fell from about 521 million in December 2018 to about 369 million in February 2019, a drop of roughly 29%, according to SimilarWeb data reported at the time. The rules also swept up artists and LGBTQ+ creators who had made Tumblr their home, and many moved elsewhere for good.
Automattic couldn’t fix the economics
In 2024, Automattic said it would move Tumblr’s half-billion blogs onto WordPress infrastructure, partly to make it cheaper to run. By mid-2025, Mullenweg said that migration was on hold and confirmed Tumblr still wasn’t profitable, as TechCrunch reported. In October 2025 he called the acquisition his “biggest failure” so far, while insisting he hadn’t given up on it.
Does anyone use Tumblr anymore?
Yes, though far fewer people than the headline numbers suggest. Tumblr hosts more than 500 million blogs, but that count includes every abandoned account since 2007.
A better signal is the EU disclosure Automattic files under the Digital Services Act. Its January to June 2026 transparency report says that, as of July 1, 2026, Tumblr averaged less than half of the 45 million monthly EU users that would make it a “very large” platform.
Our read: Tumblr is now a mid-sized niche network with a loyal core of fandom, art, writing and meme communities. Automattic says Fast Company named Tumblr one of its Most Innovative Companies of 2026, so the product isn’t frozen, even if growth is.
Why is Tumblr not popular anymore, and what replaced it?
Its best features were copied and spread across other apps. TechCrunch argued back in 2019 that Pinterest and Reddit had taken over Tumblr’s role as a home for interest-based communities. Fandom chat moved to servers on Discord (here’s who owns Discord), and short-form visual culture moved to TikTok, which our TikTok usage statistics put in context.
Tumblr also never solved discovery for newcomers. Its follow-and-reblog model rewards people who already know where to look, which is great for regulars and tough for anyone arriving cold.
Will Tumblr still exist in a few years?
No shutdown has been announced as of October 2026. The bigger risk is its parent company.
In September 2026, Automattic’s board tried and failed to remove Mullenweg as CEO, which led to a full board turnover and the departures of its CFO and chief legal officer. TechCrunch reported on October 21, 2026, that Automattic had started layoffs across several teams and that insiders expect more cuts. Automattic hasn’t linked any of this to Tumblr.
My verdict: Tumblr isn’t dead, and it isn’t safe either. A loss-making social network is an obvious line item when a company is trimming costs, and its future depends on how much patience Mullenweg still has. If you post work there that matters to you, keep your own copies.
Quick answers
Is Tumblr owned by WordPress?
Not exactly. Tumblr is owned by Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com and was founded by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg. WordPress itself is free, open-source software anyone can use. Tumblr still runs on its own separate code, since the planned move to WordPress infrastructure is on hold.
Does Tumblr allow NSFW content now?
Partly. Tumblr loosened its rules in late 2022 to allow some nudity, such as artistic work, as long as it’s labeled appropriately. Sexually explicit content is still banned, which is the core of the 2018 policy that drove so many users away.
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