WordPress might have quite a bit to gain by Yahoo’s purchasing of Tumblr for $1.1 billion. As noted, a bunch of Tumblr users are already freaking out about Yahoo buying the massively popular blogging platform (and the promise of new ads coming into the feed likely isn’t doing anything to slow the freak-out down).
Even before the acquisition was officially announced this morning, on onslaught of users importing Tumblr blogs to WordPress already began. That is, at least, according to WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.
He writes, “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.”
Despite what would appear to be a mass exodus of users leaving Tumblr for WordPress, Mullenweg appears to think that’s not the case. After he initially wrote the post, he updated it to say, “Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”
He then pointed readers to the comments on this post, where he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”
Even still, other blogging platforms are likely to get a little bump out of this.
According to a recent report from Pingdom, WordPress’ share of the world’s top blogs has already been on the rise.
