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description=Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg joins The Vergecast to talk about the future of Tumblr, his plans for the site, and why the porn ban will stay in place;

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Text of the page (random words):
1 1 billion and i was very happy for the team and i was a little relieved as a competitor because tumblr was so cool and at the time yahoo was not cool but around this deal you know i believe verizon reached out to a number of folks and also had a ton of folks incoming because the news of tumblr being for sale did leak to the wall street journal a few months ago so i know that there was a lot of incoming a lot of good bidders i m really glad that they chose automattic to be the home for it because i do believe that we re the best place that tumblr could be in terms of what we do what we re passionate about what the teams already do there s a lot of overlap between wordpress com and tumblr i m really glad that this is how it ended up it was a difficult process i want to talk about the future of tumblr but the purchase price was reportedly 3 million can you confirm that i like how y all just ask the same questions it s the question so a i think i m obligated and b it s a pretty precipitous drop in value so i m curious if you can discuss that sure we re deferring to verizon on all the details there it s really up to them what to disclose or not i can talk more generally i just did a blog post about this verizon is a company that does over 120 billion in revenue they got tumblr through yahoo which then merged with aol became oath got bought became verizon media it s something they inherited a few levels down their top priority was not trying to maximize the purchase price there might even be a corporate reason for the purchase price to be lower for taxes or something they were really looking for where the best home was going to be that was really where we tried to optimize the deal especially in terms of bringing over close to 200 people we re taking them all on i am aware of some of the details of some of the bidders you know they were not planning to keep much if any of the team going we did more of a berkshire hathaway approach we really want to bring over the management team take what was working well which is tumblr s engagement and grow from there related verizon is selling tumblr to wordpress owner most people listening to a show like this are not in your shoes very often where you go out and buy a legendary internet property describe what it was like going through that process actually people send us stuff all the time so we look at at least a few acquisitions a week most are not a good fit there was a deck they had we went over and met the management team and a few folks who work on the verizon media and verizon side of things i had some contacts at verizon that i pinged separately then there was a diligence process to try to find out as much information as you can about the business you talk about possible outcomes you just kind of figure out what works best for both sides we always approach deals from kind of a win win what i like to do is understand what motivates the other side and what s most important to them and then try to find the intersection the venn diagram overlap of what you re able to do and what s important to you so were you most engaged with verizon or with tumblr folks that s actually a good question both we both interacted with the tumblr folks and it is kind of verizon running the process they have some extremely experienced corporate development and lawyers and everything verizon lawyers i don t believe it i ll say their lawyers are super good some of the agreements that came over were like whoa the team at automattic is very tiny but powerful and we worked really really hard to make this happen there was an exclusive period and then the deadline and we got everything signed up on sunday so the deal s closed tumblr is an automattic property now we are all signed i believe that terminology is the deal is subject to customary closing conditions so it s going to take call it a few months to actually transfer everything over but now we re all signed and agreed so it s basically 99 percent of the way there so that s the deal what do you want to do with it one of the things that really surprised me is i thought as probably many do that tumblr had kind of died under its variety of corporate parents and then actually being able to see some of the numbers including some the numbers post when they changed the adult content policy i was like wow this has still got a ton going on we ll be able to talk about more of those numbers after the close because i think they re really really interesting but like i said it actually hasn t transferred over yet so i don t want to speak out of turn but there s huge engagement the people who love tumblr use it every day they have more daily active users than wordpress com has monthly active users they ve really cracked a lot of the social side of it they have more daily active users than wordpress com has monthly active users in terms of what we want to do one thing that also impressed me was just the team the people who are still there and working on tumblr are really passionate about their community about what this offer could do i know that they have a lot of things that they want to launch and do some that are even already fully built that that while this process was going on it didn t really make sense to add new things that change your service it s a very innovative team as well tumblr pioneered a lot of what later would show up on twitter instagram wordpress all sorts of other places so it s always been a very creative team and i really am looking forward to seeing that just unleashed i guess we re still a corporate parent but we re a very friendly one and we re all about blogging innovation publishing communities so i would love for tumblr to become a social alternative that s in line with automattic s values around privacy and freedom of speech and publishing but it has the fun and friendliness of some of the other networks we use but without that democracy destroying oh i don t know what you want to call it i think you want to call it facebook is that your goal to go right at facebook and twitter with tumblr no not at all i think that we ve always had some different models advertising is definitely something we re going to explore we do definitely want to grow tumblr s revenue right now they re burning a lot of money but long term i would say i m also super interested in experimenting with upgrades wordpress com has always been an upgrade centric model it s freemium use it for free and then you can buy plans anywhere from 40 to 450 per year to get added functionality i m curious about turning on things like some of the e commerce functionality we ve been developing with woocommerce memberships those things i think would be very very interesting to the tumblr community so there s just so much to unlock there julia alexander the tumblr community has watched as executives from yahoo and verizon came in and tried to grow something that they really didn t understand famously in 2016 a yahoo executive reportedly said tumblr is the next pdf it s now a major joke in the community you re the new corporate overlord how you re going to prove that you know what tumblr is and should be in a way that doesn t make them feel more alienated than they already are if anyone had nervousness now i would just say look at automattic s 14 year history or wordpress 16 year history we have a long track record with these things including building a lot of trust in an open source community which by the way is usually also very skeptical of any company at all but really i would love for people to judge us by our actions over the next 18 months call it two months to close it s going to be a few months of integration and the migrating data and servers and everything like that but then after that we need to really look at what happens and ultimately that s all i always want to be judged by our actions nilay patel obviously verizon decided that adult content was going away you tweeted last night if people want big policy changes here put pressure on the app stores of apple and google no one else has any leverage what did you mean by that this is a very nuanced issue every layer of tech policy is implicated in that conversation yeah and some people say well do you need to be in the app store just have a web version but apps really are it and i believe tumblr is one of the top 30 or 40 apps in the social networking category it s usually top couple hundred globally so their app is a big part of how people interact with it and i don t know if you ve ever been through an app review process we ve even run into this on wordpress they ll search for porn it s not like it needs to be on the homepage or on the sign up they really look for it and if they find something you can be taken down app stores can be kind of fickle and by the way it s arbitrary maybe something you launched a year ago now they re saying it s not allowed app stores can be kind of fickle not capricious but it sometimes feels a little arbitrary honestly i think if you re going to be there if you re going be on the app store you want to try to play by what they support the more nuanced and broader issue which i think is affecting every place that has user generated content is that pretty much everyone has moved beyond saying hey if it s first amendment if it s not illegal if we don t get a legal order to take it down we re happy to host and promote it and now everyone is realizing well there s a lot of stuff that s not illegal that you maybe don t want to spread everywhere else when you talk about the adult content on tumblr and the changes that they made it s really like four or five issues mixed in there there was definitely spam i was more active tumblr user eight or nine years ago and when i logged back to check it out my feed was full of nude pictures that were linking to a spam site this wasn t had it wasn t something i had subscribed to but it was a tumblog that had been taken over by spammers and they were posting five times an hour with ads for some sort of chat site spam essentially there is lots and lots of shades of gray in between and i do definitely want to learn more there s been a lot of different communities on tumblr and some of the babies might have been thrown out with the bathwater so with any sort of policy or algorithm or ai or whatever that s doing the filtering you want to evolve it and make sure that you re blocking what you say you want to block and not catching legit content as well you could do that stuff on the web you could evolve the content policy and make it maybe less restrictive there but in the app you d still be stuck inside of whatever apple and google want that s my understanding you know another thing people ask is well how do reddit and twitter or get away with it because both have tons of adult content i don t know i m actually curious a really thriving home for adult content is probably best for a company or a website which is totally dedicated to it i believe reddit has a setting you do on the web but then if you turn that off you can get more adult stuff in the app but i wonder if that just works because apple hasn t noticed it yet or if it s actually something that is allowed within their policies i don t know i will say that overall a really thriving home for adult content is probably best for a company or a website which is totally dedicated to it i know a bunch of sites popped up after the policy change in december so i mean that might be a better future versus someplace where there might be a gray line or an evolving policy wordpress is a huge platform for all kinds of creators it has obviously different monetization models as you said entire massive media publications are hosted on wordpress and individuals use wordpress do you expect that kind of scale for tumblr or do you expect it to be more of a social network the primary user experience is going to be that social network but there s no reason that vip or really high end users of wordpress can t tap into that social network and a really native beautiful integration one of the things that facebook did after cambridge analytica is they actually removed all their posting apis so you used to be able to post to wordpress and we would auto post to tumblr twitter linkedin facebook etc and they turned off those api is after cambridge analytica no one really objected or talked about it too much but effectively they turned off the part that allowed you to put external content into the facebook news feed and everything that was actually a big change in how the open web worked because previously all of the social networks had had some sort of way to get things in and out tumblr for example used to have rss feeds so you could follow things that weren t actually hosted on tumblr i would love to bring features like that back because i would love for tumblr to be a better part of the open web it really sounds like you want to be a competitor to the big social networks in terms of user attention openness politeness strength of community is that what you re aiming for i want to create a place on the web which is fun and supportive and substantial you re an old school web user at one point blogging had a real magic to it a frisson you d have blog rolls and links and people would follow and comment and you d keep up with things and it was a really really nice social network but it also was totally distributed and people had their own designs and all those sorts of things i think we can bring some of that back and reimagine it in the mobile world which is where tumblr is also super strong julia alexander tumblr also has a bunch of major issues it s seen a huge rise in extreme ideology on the platform it has seen major issues around mass shootings and the way some users glorify shooters that tumblr has had to address it s become a huge issue i just feel like it doesn t it talk about as much because it s not as big as twitter do you plan to actively go in and try to clean this up or are you just going to leave it be in the way that verizon has these are very very difficult problems so i do not want to trivialize or say that anything even if you work really hard on it will be 100 percent but one of the things that excites me is that tumblr has a great trust and safety team and so does the rest of automattic that works on wordpress com these teams have a lot of overlap and i m looking forward to them working together one of probably the first things that we ll try to harmonize across acquisition is just say hey we re doing 99 percent similar work let s make sure our policies are consistent tumblr has some really amazing automated tools that we don t have on wordpress com that work really well and what have we navigated with the nuance of content that people host on wordpress and how can we use that to inform and really encourage a healthy community on tumblr as well nilay patel do you see these platforms coming together i get the sense that you ...