WordPress just bought Scroll Kit, a visual online editor for stories

The website-making sector has seen a lot of activity lately, including Squarespace’s new $40 million round, Weebly’s $35 million in new funding, and Brandcast’s fresh $1.5 million on the same day. And we’ve even seen rumors of WordPress parent company Automattic raising new funding of about $100 million.

And speaking of WordPress, it just acquired, for an undisclosed amount, fellow website-maker Scroll Kit, a visual online editor for stories. This is according to an update on Scroll Kit’s website.

Scroll Kit got attention when one of its cofounders created a tutorial showing how folks could make their own version of the New York Times’ acclaimed Snow Fall piece, which won a Pulitzer and a Webby, and was hailed as the “future of online journalism.” The Times immediately asked the company to take the tutorial down, but it definitely gave Scroll Kit a good amount of publicity.

The update details that Scroll Kit’s team will join WordPress’s product team. “Unfortunately, Scroll Kit as you know it will be shut down,” the update adds, as the team turns its attention toward its new home, though it didn’t mention what exactly the team will be working on at WordPress. 

The site also details what this acquisition will mean for Scroll Kit users and their projects and how to migrate them to WordPress. The editor will shut down in three months. People can export their work to WordPress during the next six months, and after that, live scrolls become “read-only.” Scroll Kit has not shared how many users it has and how many projects have been created with its tool.

Interestingly, the Scroll Kit team shares that it has been highly intertwined with WordPress from its very beginning:

In a sense, this change feels like we’re coming full circle. For both of us, WordPress was our entrance into the web. Kate wrote her first HTML and CSS to modify a theme. Cody used WordPress to launch NYU Local. We’ve watched in admiration as WordPress has grown steadily over time. The team is only 250 people and yet powers 21 percent of the Web. It’s a huge percentage, but when you talk to Matt and the team, it’s clear that they are just getting started.

Scroll Kit was founded by Kate Ray and Cody Brown and raised about $222,000 in seed funding in 2010. Clay Shirky is one of the company’s advisers.