Tumblr sold for less than the world's most expensive fish

In 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for over a billion dollars. In December of last year, Tumblr announced a ban on “adult content”. Fast forward to this week, and the site has reportedly just sold to the owner of Wordpress for less than $3 million. It...hardly seems like a coincidence, does it?

Porn, mostly of the amateur, black and white, or fan fiction variety, thrived on Tumblr. So did the horny misfits and fans who were posting it, so naturally, there was some uproar from their primary user base when the ban was put in place.

Since then, many people in the community have found their homes elsewhere. Naturally, they’re finding a great deal of glee in the news that Tumblr is now apparently worth just $3 million – that’s a drop of $97,000,000, an amount of money most of us can barely comprehend having, let alone losing.

It says a lot about the power of the audience in influencing the value of social media websites, and even more about the power of nudity online. Smart Twitter users have pointed out that Tumblr is now worth less than a fish – the most expensive one ever sold, sure, but a fish all the same.

It goes without saying that the old Tumblr community were oddly thrilled with their apparent economic power...

This isn't the first time that a once massively popular social site was sold for far less than its original worth after being taken over by a large organisation. In 2005 Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired social media website MySpace for a reported $580m, making everyone's first only friend Tom a very rich man indeed. Following a $900m dollor ad deal with Google, the hit social network was valued at $12bn just two years later in 2007. And then came along Facebook, and in 2011 the site was sold on again, this time for $35m, a smidgen of the price Murdoch had originally paid.

Still, at least MySpace Tom is doing well.

More: Pornhub 'extremely interested' in buying Tumblr and lifting ban on adult content