
Verizon reportedly seeking to sell Tumblr - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/verizon-reportedly-seeking-to-sell-tumblr/
======
j9461701
The same thing happened with live journal. Executives massively over-react to
the terror of possibly hosting child pornography, and therefore decided _all_
pornography - or even anything mildly erotic - had to be ejected. And, like
what happened with live journal, the site never recovered.

As a sex positive liberal, I admit a certain level of schadenfreude at seeing
tumblr's decision bite them in the butt. Using child porn as a pretext to
justify a puritanical purge of all erotic content is absolutely obnoxious IMO.

~~~
zimpenfish
> Using child porn as a pretext to justify a puritanical purge of all erotic
> content is absolutely obnoxious IMO.

And not what Tumblr did - their erotic content ban was under way before the CP
snafu got them temporarily kicked out of the iOS App Store. Consensus is that
it saves them from SESTA-FOSTA legal troubles.

~~~
echelon
Did SESTA-FOSTA actually accomplish anything? Do we have numbers to show that
it put a stop to sex trafficking?

Why was this legislation pushed through so quickly without any opposition like
SOPA or PIPA?

I don't get the "why".

Who was behind this?

~~~
sp332
It definitely made things worse.

"New statistics shared by the San Francisco police show... sex trafficking
shot up 170 percent in 2018." [https://www.dailydot.com/irl/increase-sex-
trafficking-sesta-...](https://www.dailydot.com/irl/increase-sex-trafficking-
sesta-fosta/) They claim it's just improved reporting because of increased
outreach.

"DiAngelo says she received calls from women who are suicidal because they’ve
been forced to work on the streets and return to dangerous pimps."
[https://www.kalw.org/post/one-year-federal-law-curb-sex-
traf...](https://www.kalw.org/post/one-year-federal-law-curb-sex-trafficking-
online-remains-controversial)

"Breyer estimated that there were about double or triple the usual number of
workers seeking assistance." [https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17306486/sex-
work-online-f...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17306486/sex-work-online-
fosta-backpage-communications-decency-act)

"online private group chats where sex workers could share survival strategies
and harm reduction techniques to stay safe have also disappeared"
[https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
features/anti-s...](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
features/anti-sex-trafficking-advocates-say-new-law-cripples-efforts-to-save-
victims-629081/) (Banner image kinda NSFW)

Here's an actual survey of sex workers in Seattle.
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KBsVBQh7EsRexAyZacaf...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KBsVBQh7EsRexAyZacaf_fUvvsVb2MR1Q30_gV7Jegc/edit#slide=id.g3b643c759f_0_50)
(results start on slide 7)

And it's had effects internationally.
[https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex-
work...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex-workers-in-
australia-say-american-law-is-creating-devastating-losses-back-home/news-
story/09139a2f0d631cd7284090d2336ca517)

------
phreack
Tumblr is an absolute goldmine of pure original content unavailable anywhere
else.

A savvy enterprise that acquired it should re-allow adult content with however
many filters they like to make amends with the community and devote a while to
redo UX and quality of life. Content creators will absolutely come back, as no
proper competitor ever rose in the current vacuum yet. After that it could
turn into a unicorn in less than a year.

~~~
cageface
I think we're going to see companies start pulling back from hosting user
generated content in general. Policing it is a massive headache and a
guarantee of getting pulled into all the current political dogfighting.

~~~
ralusek
Or we could go back to the concept of content-agnostic neutral platforms, the
best of which have self-moderation available to taste (e.g. subreddit
subscriptions).

There seems to be a growing reluctance to accept that a person or a group
being allowed to exist on a platform does not in any way serve as an
endorsement of that person or group. I believe that the copyright legislation
in Europe, for example, has very little to do with copyright, and very much to
do with holding platforms accountable for the content that their users
produce. The net result is the platforms necessarily invoke nuance-less
strategies for sanitizing the content according to a narrow band of what is
acceptable.

~~~
Ygg2
> Or we could go back to the concept of content-agnostic neutral platforms

Europe's Article 13 and its companion will make sure that NEVER happens.

~~~
kermitismyhero
The EU is so frustratingly inconsistent on internet-freedom matters. On the
one hand there's a tendency towards very strong privacy protections through
the GDPR and similar legislation/regulations. And on the other there's blatant
publisher-protectionist insanity like Article 13. It's a mess.

~~~
otvsh
How is that inconsistent? Both things are heavy-handed.

~~~
majewsky
By that same logic,

> How is that inconsistent? Both things are a law.

~~~
otvsh
Which supports my comment, because if it's a law it's heavy-handed. I was
comparing it to having no laws.

------
giancarlostoro
I was pretty active on Tumblr in 2010 had thousands of followers when that was
"big" back then and its sad they never asked for paid subscriptions with minor
aesthetic features. I would of happily paid $5 a month to use my domain with
my Tumblr blog instead they gave that away too. Charge for GIF avatar
features. Charge to be able to have access to / or to post NSFW content.

This ads first mentality for profitability is stupid. Lastly throw in an ad
here or there for different musicians under their respective tags if you want
ads. Talk about contextual advertising that wouldnt bother me if I had seen
it. Like maybe a band is doing a concert in my own bam!

The way I used Tumblr I may of paid $10 a month for a premium account if they
just made it all the worthwhile. They also provide asset hosting for free.
Come on!

~~~
majani
Unfortunately targeted advertising appears to be the best way to maximize
returns for massive, VC-backed social media platforms. Charging for stuff
simply isn't as profitable. The numbers have been run before multiple times.

~~~
mrgalaxy
I was talking with Twitch's Director of Engineering about a year ago and he
was saying that their ad revenue dwarfs their revenue earned directly from
users (subscriptions and bits) by at least 10 to 1. I was amazed as I've seen
how much people are willing to give away on that site.

~~~
skizm
Which is nuts when you think that something like ~70% of twitch users have an
active ad-blocker.

~~~
asdff
Do advertisers know if their ad is getting blocked? I'd assume that they do
but are being willfully ignorant about how ineffective adverts on the web
really are. I mean who even clicks on an ad on the internet, Grandma?

~~~
skizm
I don't generally click the links, but if I see something I like, I'll google
it or go directly to the site. As for if advertisers "see" their ad being
blocked: it depends on the way the ad is being blocked / served. Most
adblockers just blacklist certain web domains, so if a JS call is made to that
domain it is blocked. The advertiser won't ever see it was blocked or have to
pay for it being shown. The website owners are usually the ones hurt most by
adblockers.

Twitch gets around this now by integrating the ads directly into the video
stream before it even hits your browser, so there is no way for a simple ad-
blocker that blacklists domains to tell when the stream is streaming an ad vs
the actual content.

Most publishers put up with adblocking because most ad companies offer "set it
and forget it" solutions. Just drop a piece of JS into their HTML and they
start earning money. Eventually publishers will get their ads via a REST API
or something (server side) and splice the ads directly into the HTML
themselves, so that the ad-blocker won't know what is content and what is ads.

At that point, ad blockers just have to make their best guess at which HTML
elements (div/span/etc.) contain ads by checking names, dimensions, and other
features and deleting that element.

I think their might be laws that say you have to explicitly label ads or
sponsored content as such, so that might make it easier.

------
tw04
Step 1: ban the thing the product you just bought makes all of its money from

Step 2: ????

Step 3: sell it for a loss!

~~~
tinus_hn
The worth of a large collection of shady pirated porn blogs is marginal. You
can only host very cheap ads next to it and it devalues the rest of the site.

~~~
danaris
A great deal of the porn is, as I understand it, not pirated, but original
content. It is, after all, something a significant percentage of the
population naturally possesses the resources to create.

------
hkmurakami
_cuts down tree_

Would anyone like to buy this nice stump?

~~~
24gttghh
Stump grinding is actually a big thing now. They make woodstove pellets from
it, and mulch, among other things.

edit: I should add that it adds to the overall destruction of a forest
ecosystem and I don't agree with it on large-scales.

------
ulfw
What has Verizon achieved with the AOL/Yahoo = Oath purchase? Flickr gone.
Tumblr gone.

A bunch of blogs?

~~~
AznHisoka
Yahoo is still most likely an advertising cash cow.. a cow that is probably
shrinking though. Wouldnt be surprised if they keep laying off Yahoo staff to
make it as profitable as possible.

------
djabatt
Classic. Telecom shouldn’t be messing around with owning social media
websites. Sadly tumblr is burnt toast thanks to yahoo and other cruft

~~~
dragontamer
Yahoo was pretty good stewards of the site however. I think Yahoo recognized
the importance of the community at least.

Yahoo never monetized Tumblr, but I don't think they did anything particularly
wrong with it.

~~~
PedroBatista
Yahoo didn’t do anything because of their lack of ability by that point, not a
virtue.

In the same way that didn’t stop Verizon..

------
marvin
Anyone want to hazard a guess at how many hundred million dollars of Tumblr’s
value was destroyed by the adult content ban?

There should be zero bonuses or incentive payments for the executive group
that made this decision. The effect was predictable and widely forecast.

------
Analemma_
If BuzzFeed is to be believed, Pornhub of all places has expressed interest:
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/pornhub-i...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/pornhub-
interested-in-buying-tumblr). It seems weird until you realize they probably
couldn’t do a worse job than Yahoo and Verizon did; at least they understand
why people visit the site.

~~~
solveit
Pornhub is competent, "gets" Tumblr, and has the know-how when it comes to
filtering porn. With how cheap they're going to get this, this could be a
massive win for Pornhub.

~~~
culturestate
Agreed. Seems like a no-brainer for PH if they have the cash.

------
PedroBatista
If Tumblr with porn was a dumpster fire, now it’s just a dumpster with ashes.

Good luck with the sale.

------
coralreef
A lot of people will blame Yahoo for Tumblr's demise, but Tumblr's product
just did not do enough to keep up in the mobile era. They were soundly out-
competed for attention by Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and Facebook.

~~~
plankers
If you think the demise of tumblr is about anything other than FOSTA, we must
be experiencing different parts of the internet.

~~~
isoskeles
Tumblr peaked (in google searches) in mid-2013:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=tumblr).
Peak Alexa rank was at #23 in August 2013 according to this:
[http://tumblr.com.alexarankdb.com/](http://tumblr.com.alexarankdb.com/)

FOSTA became law in April 2018.

So please explain to us how FOSTA was responsible for Tumblr's demise.

~~~
bennesvig
I was a heavy Tumblr user until I discovered Reddit around then, which made it
easier to find the same type of content with more consistency.

------
nailer
Please sell it to Pornhub.

Don't run it as a porn site, but run it as an art site for adults.

Restore all the adult content.

Make a decent mobile app, where viewers can like or tip easily.

Help creators get paid, using Pornhub's leverage with their financial
institutions

~~~
kennydude
When the porn ban was being implemented they were saying for creators to
upload their content to them (art etc), which seemed odd. They're really been
following this for a while.

------
pram
I'd like to point out that Verizon didn't buy Yahoo to get Tumblr. In all
likelihood they never had any plans for it to begin with. I'm honestly
surprised they didn't just shut it down.

------
rahuldottech
Not surprising. I don't think Verizon "gets" Tumblr, or knows how to deal with
it

~~~
partiallypro
To be fair, Yahoo didn't "get" Tumblr either; they just more or less didn't
try to do anything with it. Verizon tried to appeal to more advertisers...but
completely shot themselves in the foot. I honestly don't see how it can be
salvaged. There is a rumor that PornHub could buy it, but I'm not sure how
that's possible. It will be interesting how cheap it is sold. Yahoo bought it
for $1.1. Billion. I'm sure by now it's worth 1/4th of that.

~~~
gizmo686
It's not clear that Tumblr can be salvaged anymore. A name like pornhub could
give confidence that Tumblr won't try another porn purge; at least to the
people paying attention. But I suspect that the vast majority of users that
left would simply be unaware of change of policy, let alone the change of
ownership.

And even if they were, the community is gone, and you can't just rebuild that.

~~~
kenhwang
How about selling Tumblr to where its community has seem to gone? Twitter.
Gives Twitter a long format and a better platform for content.

~~~
ilikehurdles
I don’t think they all went to one place. You say Twitter but my anecdotal
impression was reddit.

~~~
nickthegreek
I have some model and photographer friends who were big on Tumblr and they
came to visit me a couple weeks ago. They ran popular tumblr blogs and are
fully financed from their Patreons. Their said all their friends who's
livelyhood depended on their reach switched to twitter from tumblr. I'm sure
the small porn blogs or so just died or maybe went somewhere else. But twitter
is where the bulk of the professionals took refuge.

------
soup10
Its amazing how quickly sites can fall when management makes a bonehead move
and the community turns against it, reminds me of Digg.

------
cribbles
Lost in the flutter of this discussion is Oath's absurd, borderline comical
full-page GDPR notice that gets slapped on _every_ Tumblr subdomain. This was
as much or more of a traffic deterrent for me than the content restrictions,
which as far as I can tell were never competently enforced (but succeeded in
driving off a lot of users anyhow).

~~~
jfk13
Agreed - personally, I was never a tumblr user anyway, but Oath's farcical
"GDPR" notice has ensured that I will never use any of their sites, whatever
kind of content they may have.

------
neurobashing
Alternative take: the great porn purge cleaned the sites biggest problem up,
and in the hands of a capable administrator, it’s a nonissue (which is to say
pornhub is a good fit)

~~~
larkeith
Keep in mind that a fairly significant section of the community (anything sex-
positive, adult-adjacent, or associated with either) got swept out along with
the porn, and a larger portion followed them ("community" bites both ways,
especially if you break trust). I'm not sure I can think of any social sites
that have survived and rebuilt after such a large exodus - after all, you've
already alienated the populous most interested in and willing to discover your
product.

------
kowdermeister
It would be quite a plot twist if PornHub acquired them :)

~~~
peterkelly
They're definitely interested:

[https://popculture.com/trending/2019/05/02/pornhub-
intereste...](https://popculture.com/trending/2019/05/02/pornhub-interested-
buying-tumblr/)

~~~
return1
Techcrunch has another article about why _pornhub shouldn 't buy tumblr_ ,
which brings up some good points [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/porns-
secret-monopoly/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/porns-secret-monopoly/)

~~~
skinnymuch
But top 10 porn tube sites like Xvideos and Xhamster aren’t owned by Mindgeek.
They have enough porn to satisfy the majority. The article is arguing mindgeek
alone is causing issues and lower wages. When it seems more like it is people
being cool with piracy and tube sites popping up.

------
paxys
What is Tumblr even worth now?

------
_rpd
How much do they want for it?

------
ycombonator
Wasn’t this one of Marissa Mayer’s accomplishments ?

------
Noxmiles
ಠ⌣ಠ

