News Courtesy of Techcrunch.com:
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and a few other things, is acquiring Brooklyn-based startup Atavist.
Atavist has been working on a content management system for independent bloggers and writers. With an Atavist website, you can easily write and publish stories with a ton of media.
You might think that this isn’t particularly groundbreaking as anyone can create a website on WordPress.com or Squarespace and do the same thing. But the company also lets you create a paywall and build a subscription base.
Many writers don’t want to deal with the technical details of running a website. That’s why Atavist gives you the tools so that you can focus on your stories.
Atavist is also running a publication called Atavist Magazine. The publication is also joining Automattic. It’s unclear if it’s going to be part of Longreads or remain its own thing.
Ryan’s Take 
This is an interesting acquisition by the team behind WordPress. The WordPress platform already provides an outlet for writers and bloggers that make it easy to promote content. It does seem like, the paywall features that Atavist incorporates might be the primary reason for the buyout.
I’m not too familiar with Atavist, but looking at their features they mention using Stripe to process credit card transactions. Once the Stripe fees are deducted, they take a 1% to 15% cut depending on the membership tier you’re enrolled in. Stripe is easy enough to integrate into WordPress on its own, so this leads me to believe that the paywall model and infrastructure of Atavist is what lead Automattic to purchase Atavist.
I’m always curious about the performance of an acquired company before, during, and after an acquisition. According to SimilarWeb, traffic has exploded in just several months for atavist.com. Starting off at a healthy 410,000 visits for December 2017, that number has more than tripled to 1,750,000 for May 2018. The platform seems to be trending quickly. U.S. traffic makes up almost a third of total visits. Surprisingly, Indonesia takes second place at 12% total visits.
This could end up being a very lucrative purchase. With a major update to WordPress due soon (Gutenberg), big changes appear to be on the horizon. Perhaps, now that WordPress has cemented itself as a dominant platform, the time is ripe for it to capitalize on its popularity.
