
If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn? - w1ntermute
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-17/if-yahoo-buys-tumblr-what-will-it-do-with-all-that-porn
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nhebb
Why would Tumblr be singled out when Bing gets away with it? Bing goes so
unnoticed that their image search is practically a porn engine (if you turn
off safe search), and I've never heard an outcry about that.

Every female celebrity or politician has "nude" or "naked" somewhere in the
suggested searches. To illustrate my point, do a Bing image search for Bill
Clinton. Next, try it for Hillary. Not quite as bad, but try image searches
for Barack and Michelle Obama. The top three suggestions for Michelle are Ass,
Booty, and Butt. They may argue that they're just reflecting what users search
for, but I have trouble believing that a lot of people are out there looking
for nude photos of Nancy Pelosi.

~~~
ghshephard
The difference is that Tumblr is hosting the material, whereas Bing is
indexing it. And, if you do a search from Bing (or Google, for that matter)
from Singapore, the results are quite tame, whereas the tumblr website appears
the same.

I do get your point though - Google has, as of late, even with safe search
off, made it much more difficult to "trip across" porn on the internet (you
really have to be looking for it) - whereas with Bing, it's basically, "We'll
show you porn if there is a faint chance that it's relevant) - I.E. "redhead."

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venomsnake
Okay - why porn is even problem? The people in 18-45 group have grown with
porn, they have voluntarily and involuntarily seen and read porn they like,
porn they don't like, kinky porn they like, kinky porn they don't like, they
have been goatse-d, japanese whale-d, two girls one cup-ed and either don't
mind porn or have become completely desensitized towards it.

And lets be honest a lot of top advertisements have not threaded carefully
into innuendoland.

~~~
riffraff
operating in certain countries may require paying attention to such things,
same as for copyright violations and other "minor" offences.

While a smaller corp may ignore the issue, yahoo is big enough that it's
guaranteed to have to pay attention to these things.

(Also: I have never heard of "japanese whale" and it worries me)

~~~
Wevah
(Tubgirl, maybe? :S)

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rukshn
Tumblr directors have given go signal to Yahoo offer. Now it's up to Yahoo
director when they meet on Sunday

Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported Tumblr's board of directors approved Yahoo!'s
offer and the Yahoo! board is expected to go along with Mayer's wish to buy
Tumblr. There's still a little room for things to fall apart, but it's
unlikely that's going to happen. So no, the Yahoo! deal will likely not be
falling apart.

~~~
josscrowcroft
Well we'd all agree they've done a delightful job with Flickr, so let's see
how quickly they can destroy Tumblr next!

~~~
rukshn
Yah if Yahoo decides to shut down tumblr sometime in the future not even the
Archive Team Will be able to save it

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Encosia
Flickr and Tumblr have more in common than just the inability to buy a vowel.
If the kind of things I've seen on Flickr have been allowed to exist for years
under the Yahoo umbrella, I can't imagine that Tumblr's risque content is in
any danger.

~~~
markdown
:O How deep did you go? I've never seen anything more risque than you'd see in
a museum or art gallery on Flickr.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I found "compromising" pictures of a friend of a friend on flickr once. That
having been said, it was shocking to find it on flickr, I can't think of any
other time I saw content anywhere near that "vulgar". Certainly in my
experience, flick is like .5% as "porny" as tumblr.

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greggman
Why does anyone care? Let people mark things as "adult" and move on. Youtube
does this mostly, Blogger does this, why can't Yahoo and Tumblr?

~~~
danmaz74
Youtube requires age verification if you want to see "adult" videos. I guess
that many people want to browse that kind of content anonymously, so requiring
the same on tumblr could cut the traffic a lot.

~~~
vidyesh
Weirdly, if its embedded it won't ask you to login. No age verification
required.

So if you are paranoid and don't want to log in and start getting those videos
in 'recommended for you' list. Just take the embed code put to it a .html file
and open.

~~~
ville
You can also just add

    
    
      data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,
    

to the beginning of the code and paste it to your address bar.

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varjag
Yahoo's Flickr is one huge porn site sugarcoated a bit with legit content. You
are never further than 3-4 clicks away from downright smut there.

So I think nothing will change.

~~~
jacquesm
Interesting, I've never seen porn on flickr. On the web porn is probably
indeed never further than 3 to 4 clicks away so flickr likely is no exception
but it depends very much on how you use the web. Unless I'm researching
something I don't dive deep or follow many links so when someone asks me to
look at a picture on flickr and then I leave again.

Are there any figures on what the percentage of adult content is on flickr?

~~~
camus
me neither ,never saw a porn picture on flickr , and i used it a lot.

~~~
varjag
Settings > Privacy & Permissions > Content Filters > SafeSearch: off

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UVB-76
Porn isn't the problem with Tumblr. The problem is copyrighted content.

In my experience, Tumblr is primarily a platform for young people to "reblog"
(i.e. publish and distribute) copyrighted content without the owners'
permission.

~~~
sp332
It's not so much _re_ -blogging that's the problem but the "blogging" i.e.
uploading it to tumblr in the first place. If a photo is already on tumblr,
re-blogging doesn't really make another copy, it's all just links from then
on.

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dotcoma
This is not even close to being the real problem, imho.

According to Google AdPlanner, Tumblr has between 14 million unique visitors
per moth and between 5 and 10 million page impressions a day. Seriously, how
does that justify this kind of a value for the company?

~~~
adventured
Tumblr is directly tracked by Quantcast.

They do 65x million uniques per month and 5.4x billion pageviews.

The most concerning thing for Tumblr, is the fact that they've had zero net
growth in traffic and uniques over the last year. And their monthly pageviews
are down 2 billion versus a year ago. Their traffic is likely done growing. If
Tumblr doesn't sell now, they're in deep shit.

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voltagex_
Sigh, I wrote this as a comment, why couldn't I have written this article?

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philpill
I'll be interested to see Marissa Mayer's stance on this - I wonder if she'll
be as progressive as the media makes her out to be.

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dscrd
Incredible amounts of money?

