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Gutenberg Editor Now In Testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps

One of the most thought-provoking statements to come out of WordCamp Europe 2022, was when Matt Mullenweg said, “I believe that Gutenberg can be a bigger contribution to the world than WordPress itself.”

This isn’t the first time Mullenweg has cast this vision of Gutenberg’s preeminence as an open source project. In the Q&A following his 2021 State of the Word address, he said, “Gutenberg is something even bigger than WordPress, which is basically saying how do we edit and create the web? And how can we get as many people, both proprietary and open source collaborating on that as possible?”

Making Gutenberg available to the broader web was part of the reasoning behind dual-licensing the project under the GPL and MIT. Proprietary, and particularly mobile application use (where the GPL is not common), is better supported by the MIT license.

Gutenberg is already finding a destiny of its own outside of WordPress. Projects like Drupal Gutenberg and Laraberg were some the early seeds of the wider Gutenberg ecosystem, demonstrating that communities other than WordPress find value in the project and can adapt it for use with their applications. At WordCamp Europe, Mullenweg announced that both Tumblr and Day One are now testing Gutenberg in their web apps.

Tumblr users who want to access the new beta post editor, which was code named “Gutenblr,” can click on the prompt at the top of the page to switch. It’s opt-in for now while it’s still being tested.

Activating the beta unlocks the new Gutenberg-powered editor with redesigned buttons and icons. Users can post a series of multiple blocks in what feels like a mini, pared-back post editor. Certain blocks can be dragged and dropped into a different order on the draft, but this is still a little buggy. Tumblr’s editor is fun to use compared to WordPress’ version of Gutenberg which does a lot more but at the expense of having to support many more settings and controls.

When Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019, Mullenweg was forthright about his intention to replace the Tumblr backend with WordPress.

“WordPress is an open source web operating system that can power pretty much anything, including Tumblr.com, but it’s also a large property so will take a bit to figure out and migrate,” Mullenweg said.

Two years later, in November 2021, the Tumblr changelog noted that the development team was working on a new major version of the beta post editor on web, leveraging parts of Gutenberg. In a Twitter conversation discussing Tumblr’s architecture, Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura said its implementation of Gutenberg stores everything as JSON, whereas WordPress serializes HTML as the default experience because it needs to work with the ecosystem. In both cases, blocks are created as structured data.

“I’m personally looking forward to when you could just copy and paste blocks between platforms like you do with patterns!” Matías Ventura said when tweeting out the screenshots of Gutenberg on Tumblr and Day One.

This sort of interoperability across apps is similar to the idea behind the Block Protocol project. It aims to build a block system for embedding interactive blocks in any web application. As more of the web embraces the block paradigm, it would be helpful to be able to share blocks across a standardized protocol.

The Block Protocol spec is being developed by the team at HASH, which is currently hiring a WordPress developer to create a Block Protocol Gutenberg plugin. The goal of the plugin is to “unlock the entire Block Protocol ecosystem of blocks for all users of WordPress (both technical and not),” which would extend the range of blocks available to Gutenberg users.

When the Block Protocol project was announced, it didn’t seem likely that it would use Gutenberg as the basis for its spec. However, the wide usage of Gutenberg across the web cannot be ignored. This forthcoming plugin appears to be more like a bridge or connector that ensures Gutenberg is still relevant in the Block Protocol ecosystem.

WordPress is an important player in the creation of both blocks and an intuitive editor for publishing them, as the primary incubator for Gutenberg’s initial development and essentially its first adopter. The block editor making its way to more apps like Tumblr and Day One is a major milestone, and it’s inspiring to see collaboration on an initiative connecting Gutenberg users with another global registry of blocks designed to move across apps on the web.

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Automattic Raises $300M in Series D Investment Round, Valuation Jumps to $3 Billion

Automattic announced another round of funding today, a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures, giving the company a $3 billion valuation post-funding. The last time Automattic raised money was $160 million in a Series C round in 2014. Since that time the company has grown to more than 950 employees and made strategic acquisitions, including WooCommerce in 2015 and Tumblr (closing in 2019).

CEO Matt Mulleneweg said the funds will enable the company to speed up and scale its product development, as well as continue the company’s continual contributions to WordPress:

For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg.

In 2016, Mullenweg identified both Jetpack and WooCommerce as “multi-billion dollar opportunities” that could each be larger than WordPress.com in the future. Jetpack has grown from 1+ million users in 2016 to more than 5 million today. The plugin’s product team has aggressively expanded its commercial plans and features and is one of the first to experiment with offering previews and commercial upgrade nudges for blocks in WordPress’ editor.

WooCommerce has also grown to more than 5 million active installs (from 1+ million in 2015 at the time of acquisition). The e-commerce platform has a more challenging market with formidable competitors like Shopify, which recently overtook eBay as the second largest shopping site after Amazon. Shopify reported $362 million in revenue during its last quarter with $153 million coming from subscriptions to the Shopify platform.

I asked Mullenweg about how the funding might help Automattic make WooCommerce more user-friendly and competitive. Despite going up against the seemingly indomitable e-commerce powerhouses, Mullenweg sees WooCommerce’s platform an opportunity for growing independent stores on the web.

“WooCommerce already represents the best way to marry content and commerce, and has a huge advantage being so tightly integrated from a user perspective with WordPress itself,” Mullenweg said. “However it also inherits some of the barriers WordPress has to adoption, particularly from new users. I think that Gutenberg will help a ton, as it’s better than any of the builders the eCommerce players have, and when that gets combined with the flexibility, control, and scalability you get from WP + WooCommerce it’s going to be huge. There’s a ton of work left to do, though, and we’re trying to grow that team as quickly as possible to keep up with the opportunity.”

Mullenweg declined to share any information about Jetpack and WooCommerce’s revenue today but confirmed that they have not yet eclipsed WordPress.com.

“What I can say is that WP.com is still our biggest business, and WooCommerce was our fastest growing last year,” he said.

Automattic’s most recent round of funding will help the company better monetize these products that have grown in tandem with WordPress’ market share, which W3Techs puts at 34.5% of the top 10 million websites. Independent stores sitting on top of this large chunk of the web represent a significant market that Automattic is currently dominating in the WordPress space.

The Tumblr acquisition also affords another opportunity to introduce e-commerce solutions to more of Automattic’s customers. Mullenweg previously said the Tumblr app receives 20X more daily signups than the WordPress mobile app. The social network/blogging hybrid also has a significantly younger user base, based on a 2018 study that found 43 percent of internet users between the ages of 18 to 24 years old used Tumblr. It’s an untapped market for e-commerce, as Tumblr users who want to sell currently have to use a service like Shopify or Ecwid and generate a Tumblr-compatible widget.

Mullenweg said the acquisition hasn’t closed yet but Automattic may explore e-commerce on Tumblr in 2020.

“Once it closes there will be a few months of normal integration work and getting the teams working together, making sure we have harmonized policies on support, content moderation, anti-spam, ads, and all of those lower-level things,” he said. “Beyond that I’ve seen what you’re seeing — a lot of Tumblr users want access to more customization and e-Commerce. There are no specific plans yet but I imagine that’s something the team will consider for next year’s roadmap.”

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Micro.blog Adds Tumblr Cross-Posting

Over the weekend, Micro.blog added Tumblr cross-posting to its service in response to Automattic’s acquisition of the company. Micro.blog users can now elect to have their blog posts automatically syndicated to Tumblr.

Although Tumblr is somewhat of a competitor to Micro.blog’s social networking and microblogging service, founder Manton Reece said he sees Tumblr as more of a social network:

I usually avoid adding blog hosting services to Micro.blog’s available cross-posting destinations. After all, if it’s a good blog host that I could recommend as your primary blog, why not just post everything there instead of using Micro.blog’s own blog hosting? But the more I’ve used Tumblr in the last couple of weeks, the more I think about Tumblr as a community first and a blog host second.

Micro.blog may bear some similarities to Tumblr but the service has an entirely different flavor. It has become an alternative watering hole for indie web enthusiasts with its support for Webmention and Micropub protocols. Many who use the service seem to already be convinced of the value of hosting a blog that is independent from the major social media silos.

Micro.blog already had several Tumblr-related features built in to the platform. Users can follow Tumblr blogs on Micro.blog by visiting the Discover feed and plugging in any Tumblr domain name. Micro.blog users can also add their own Tumblr feeds to their accounts so followers can see posts from both their main microblog and the Tumblr blog.

On a recent episode of the Core Intuition podcast titled “A Much Bigger Megaphone,” Reece and co-host Daniel Jalkut, the developer of MarsEdit, speculate on the future of Tumblr and discuss some key differences from Micro.blog’s service and social network. Micro.blog acts more as an aggregate of blogs from around the web, whereas Tumblr’s blogging aspect is limited to Tumblr accounts only.

Both networks aim to make blogging easier and seem to focus on shorter-style posts. However, Micro.blog is more of a social network for independent microbloggers who want to connect their content to a stream of blogs. Tumblr is a blogging service that has a symbiotic relationship with the communities its publishing capabilities enable. It has the potential to become the most important social network on the open web, given its active user base and Automattic’s commitment to independent publishing.

Both Reece and Jalkut said they were optimistic that Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr will introduce more opportunities for both Micro.blog and MarsEdit, as the company’s influence makes it easier to market the value of owning your own blog. For a long time, Tumblr’s API hasn’t supported some of the key features of MarsEdit and Jlkut said he is hopeful that with Automattic at the helm the API may change to support the types of things his customers need.

In a post published shortly after the acquisition, Reece said he believes Tumblr has a lot of overlap with Micro.blog and views Automattic as having a “shared vision of the future that embraces content ownership, supports healthy communities, and deemphasizes massive social networks.” Those who value blogs and blogging are hopeful that Tumblr’s new ownership will rekindle some of the social magic that was present in the early days of the web but has since become more scarce.

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Automattic Acquires Tumblr, Plans to Rebuild the Backend Powered by WordPress

Automattic has acquired Tumblr, a long-time friendly rival company, for an undisclosed sum. Just six years after Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company is said to have been acquired for “a nominal amount” from Verizon, who indirectly acquired Tumblr when it bought Yahoo in 2017.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg declined to comment on the financial deals of the acquisition, but a source familiar to Axios puts the deal “well south of $20 million.”

Tumblr is Automattic’s biggest acquisition yet in terms of product users and employees gained. The microblogging and social networking website currently hosts 475.1 million blogs, for which Automattic will now assume operating costs. All 200 of Tumblr’s employees will be moving over to Automattic, bringing the company’s total employee count over 1,000.

Mullenweg took to the Post Status community Slack channel for an impromptu Q&A this afternoon where he discussed more of Automattic’s plans for Tumblr. He outlined a brief roadmap for Tumblr’s future that includes re-architecting its backend with WordPress:

  1. Move infrastructure off Verizon
  2. Support same APIs on both WP.com and Tumblr
  3. Switch backend to be WP
  4. Open source Tumblr.com client similar to Calypso

“WordPress is an open source web operating system that can power pretty much anything, including Tumblr.com, but it’s also a large property so will take a bit to figure out and migrate,” Mullenweg said.

Automattic doesn’t currently have plans to change the frontend Tumblr experience. Mullenweg said the Tumblr mobile app gets 20x more daily signups than the WordPress app. “It’s working amazingly well, despite being fairly constrained in what they can launch the past few years,” he said.

Tumblr changed its adult content policy in December 2018, banning pornographic content which reportedly accounted for 22.37 percent of incoming referral traffic from external sites in 2013 when it was acquired by Yahoo. Automattic has a similar content policy in place for WordPress.com and Mullenweg confirmed that the company does not plan to lift the ban on adult content.

“Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety… it’s a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there,” Mullenweg said in response to questions on Hacker News. “I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.”

Automattic’s Tumblr Acquisition Opens Up New Possibilities for E-Commerce, Plugins, and Themes

Beyond this initial roadmap Mullenweg outlined, he also said he thinks “e-commerce on Tumblr is a great idea,” with simpler features developed first. In the past, Tumblr users who wanted to add e-commerce to their sites would need to use a service like Shopify or Ecwid and generate a Tumblr-compatible widget. Users would have to move to a self-hosted site on another platform in order to get more full-featured e-commerce capabilities. Automattic has the ability to build e-commerce into the platform using WooCommerce or any number of other existing solutions for simpler sales features.

An emerging Tumblr/WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem is also a possibility but may not affect the wider WordPress ecosystem as much unless Automattic opens up the Tumblr marketplace to third-party developers. Mullenweg said once Tumblr’s backend is on WordPress, the idea of plugins can be explored. Whether that is on a private network, like WordPress.com, or a new breed of self-hosted Tumblr sites, is yet to be seen.

Automattic’s apparent bargain basement deal on Tumblr is good news for the preservation of the open web, as the company is committed to supporting independent publishing. Migrating Tumblr’s infrastructure to WordPress also expands WordPress’ market share with a significantly younger user base. A study conducted by We Are Flint in 2018 found 43 percent of internet users between the ages of 18 to 24 years old used Tumblr.

Tumblr’s primary demographic thrives on community and its current feature set is built to support that. If Automattic can preserve Tumblr’s distinct community and convenient publishing, while invisibly re-architecting it to use WordPress, users could potentially enjoy seamless transitions across platforms to suit their publishing needs. This improves the likelihood that this generation of internet users will continue to own their own content instead of tossing it away on social media silos that feed on users’ most important thoughts, writings, and memories.

“I’m very excited about Tumblr’s next chapter and looking forward working with Matt Mullenweg and the entire team at Automattic,” Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio said. “I’m most excited for what this means for the entire Tumblr community. There is much more to do to make your experience a better one, and I’m super confident that we are in great hands with this news. Tumblr and WordPress share common founding principles. The plane has landed on a friendly runway. Now it is time to freshen up the jets.”

In the announcement on his Tumblr blog, Mullenweg said he sees “some good opportunities to standardize on the Open Source WordPress tech stack.” This migration will undoubtedly be a formidable technical challenge and Mullenweg promised to document the team’s work after it is complete. In the meantime, the Tumblr team has new functionality they plan to introduce after the acquisition is officially closed.

“When the possibility to join forces became concrete, it felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have two beloved platforms work alongside each other to build a better, more open, more inclusive – and, frankly, more fun web,” Mullenweg said. “I knew we had to do it.”