I cannot for the life of me fathom what the strategy was there. Buy a website and ban the biggest traffic driver to it? Tumblr is a ghost town now compared to what it was. Everyone moved on. Lighting $5B on fire to warm your house would have been more productive than what they did.
Unless I'm mistaken it's Verizon who decided to do the ban, then automattic bought it for much cheaper because it was a ghost town.
Don't get why Automattic doesn't reverse the ban though.