As Yahoo completes its massive acquisition of Tumblr, Tumblr users are making good on their promise to abandon ship.
They’re bringing hundreds of thousands of posts to the next-best thing: WordPress.
As of Sunday night, users were importing about 72,000 posts an hour from Tumblr, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote on his blog. The usual number is 400-600. (On the flip side, WordPress exported about 67 posts an hour during the same period.)
Wordpress is still free from corporate influence, as it’s owned by Mullenweg’s company Automattic. That’s a big deal for Tumblr users, many of whom utterly freaked out over the weekend at the prospect of Yahoo owning their blogs and communities.
Mullenweg noted that the “relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly,” and called the acquisition “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.”
Mullenweg added that though those numbers seem huge, it’s not a game-changer. “Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups,” he said. “For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage.”
Illustration by Jason Reed