WordPress parent company Automattic announced the acquisition of Atavist, the ground-breaking publishing platform and magazine founded in 2011. As part of the deal, the Atavist team will join Automattic. This includes CEO Jefferson Rabb, Editor-in-Chief Seyward Darby, and Head of Product Communications Kathleen Ross.
Atavist will integrate its storytelling-focused features into WordPress, and transition its customer base to the world’s most popular web publishing platform.
“Atavist Magazine’s longform stories fit perfectly with our love of #longreads, and we are looking forward to incorporating the functionality of Atavist’s CMS platform into WordPress.com and Jetpack to make it available to a much wider audience,” said Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, and CEO and founder of Automattic. “Direct subscribers supporting content they love is a model that is going to continue to scale.”
“Atavist has always worked to help people build and tell important stories. We’re thrilled to continue to do that with a platform as powerful and popular as WordPress,” said CEO Jefferson Rabb. “We were hoping it would be a bigger thing. But we saw people do work that we were proud of on the platform. I feel like, as a fairly small company, we’ve accomplished quite a lot.”
The deal covers Atavist’s proprietary content management system, its customer base, and Atavist Magazine, which publishes long-form journalism every month. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet.
Here is the full text of the official statement on the acquisition:
“Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has acquired Atavist (as of June 21, 2018). Here at Atavist, we have always sought to make it easy for our community of storytellers to build with our easy-to-use tools so you can focus on what matters: your content. And we’re thrilled to continue to do that with a platform as powerful as WordPress.
So, what does this mean for you, an Atavist user? Although the precise specifics of the transition will be worked out in the upcoming weeks, the goal is to integrate Atavist features into WordPress. Our hope is to seamlessly provide the features that you’ve come to rely on along with the many advantages of WordPress’s massive scope, stability, and open-source philosophy. In the meantime, you can continue publishing as usual on the platform.”
