The rise and fall of once-$1 billion Tumblr, the early 2010s blogging site that defined a generation before fizzling out via a measly $3 million sale

The entrepreneur taught himself to code at age 11, dropped out of high school when he was 15, and later founded Tumblr at age 21 from his mom's apartment. He was known for commuting into the company's New York City office via Vespa.

He told venture capitalist Chris Dixon in 2011 that he started Tumblr to give users a different kind of blogging platform that was more free-form and less complicated than the likes of WordPress and Blogger.

It wasn't a social networking site like Facebook that required you to "friend" other users, though there was a community-building aspect to it — it was a blogging (or microblogging, depending on who you asked) platform for sharing all sorts of media.

Bands like Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Rey, and The Neighborhood were popularized on the website.

Source: Inc, The Guardian

Users from all walks of life could celebrate freedom of expression and quickly compile their random thoughts and photos into one curated, design-focused space that could be entirely customized.

Karp took an idea called "tumblelogging," a trend originally created by a 2005 site called anarchaia.org, and ran with it.

Source: Business Insider, The Atlantic, Wired

By 2012, Tumblr was hosting more than 42 million blogs and was valued at $800 million, according to a report from The Guardian at the time. Investors included the likes of Virgin visionary Sir Richard Branson.

However, Tumblr never really had a proven, profitable business model, although that wasn't a rarity in the world of buzzy startups in realms like Silicon Valley. It got part of its revenue from advertising.

"I don't think that Tumblr is so much better; I think that it's a very different behavior," Karp said, according to CNET. "It's media — something to do before checking your email."

Tumblr boasted over 100 million blogs in 2013. It was around this time that users began to openly post and consume sexual content on Tumblr, a feat especially helpful for minority groups seeking more inclusive depictions of sex, as The Conversation noted recently.

Karp was even on board with the sexual openness on Tumblr, calling it "an excellent platform for porn" in early 2012.

However, the NSFW content spooked advertisers, and Tumblr lost that would-be revenue.

Source: Wired

Karp told the New York Observer in 2008 that "we would really rather not be gobbled up by a big media company."

But nevertheless, that's exactly what ended up happening.

Tumblr users were so upset by the idea that they signed a petition with about 170,000 signatures protesting the deal, which went through anyway.

The telecoms giant bought the media firm in early 2017 for $4.5 billion, lumping Yahoo and AOL together into a new entity dubbed Oath.

There was a reported culture clash between Tumblr and its acquirers, and a product marketing manager at the time told Mashable in February that the team was "severely under-appreciated, understaffed, underfunded, and lacked a lot of tools that could have made our work great and potentially grown the business."

After 10 years as CEO of his company — a rarity in the world of tech — Karp announced on Twitter in 2017 that he was stepping away "after months of reflection on my personal ambitions."

In 2018, the so-called Tumblr apocalypse set in when the company controversially banned sexually explicit content after Apple removed the app from its store, citing evidence of child pornography.

It was a pivotal moment in the company's history and prompted scores of users to flee.

Tumblr website visits dropped 40% from October 2018 to October 2021, according to data from Similarweb, as The Atlantic reported.

Verizon sold to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress — the very publishing site that Karp sought to rival upon founding Tumblr.

... except for popstar Taylor Swift claiming that Tumblr is still her favorite social media platform in late 2019.

She told Billboard that it "feels like a neighborhood rather than an entire continent."

Swift is one of many to have gone viral via Tumblr posts, such as one of her excitedly welcoming autumn in 2014.

Tumblr might be readying to experience a comeback thanks to the same youths currently romanticizing the early aughts: Gen Z.

Sixty-one percent of new Tumblr users as of early this year were under 24, Quartz reported in March.

And Vogue in January penned a blog entitled "The 2014 Tumblr Girl is Back," pointing out both the lingering cultural effects on millennials today — as well as Gen Z's interest.

The style is "gaining significant traction thanks to content creators and fashionistas reviving their adolescent aesthetics," Vogue wrote. "Now the Tumblr girl style is being revisited by its millennial originators, but also Gen Z, which has discovered and altered the trend."