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Oath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions

Oath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions). I guess because of the way the content is displayed they can't just segregate nsfw stuff into a demonetized stream, but if they think they can turn Tumblr into a mainstream site that shows family-centric ads, they clearly don't understand what they bought.

netcan 8y ago
Corporate sensibilities and media... This isn't a new issue. Media like to be edgy, contraversy provacative. Corporate sensibilities is allergic to scandal or contraversy, especially of the "public morals" type.
JulianMorrison 8y ago
To me it feels like a "management removed the free snacks" moment. Doesn't affect me directly, but what it says about how things are changing makes me think "doomed in very short order".
AJ007 8y ago
This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at Verizon are reading this: - Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. - Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes, your business is dead.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  > They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-reports-earnings-as-auction-comes-to-close/#579d338c6e09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...
- jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
  >This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."
- jamesholden 8y ago
  - Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. I mean, can't they see that a lot of traffic flows through tumblr via those interests? Do they not know how much of a loss of usage that this will cause? I legitimately have zero other reason to use tumblr.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    On the contrary, it's probably a small part of their service. The nature of Tumblr is to make it easy to find like minded people, and construct a subset of the site that's full of what you're into. So it's very easy to feel "Tumblr is all left-wing teens" or "Tumblr is all porn" depending on what you go looking for. But Tumblr is a galaxy of niches and I doubt porn was their mainstay. This fact probably caused them to underestimate the disruptive effect of banning it.
    - soundwave106 8y ago
      Actually, I more tend to agree with this article (https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-thi...) that a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant part of Tumblr. Furthermore, my impression of Tumblr was that it had quite a bit of artists. Most artist-oriented platforms have policies that aim at banning the more overt commercial pornography, while allowing artistic nudity or erotica with appropriate tags (see DeviantArt, Vimeo, etc.) I was actually quite surprised that Tumblr didn't try this route at first to be honest. From what I can tell the "adult content ban" Tumblr implemented is way overly broad-based, not to mention very US-moral attitude centric (eg "female presenting nipples" is less of a big deal in many countries).
      - JulianMorrison 8y ago
- protomyth 8y ago
  Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. This is the part I really don't understand. Wouldn't you do a test run through their site and do some checking? You cannot claim you don't have examples available.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Image analysis takes time. You’d have X servers to deal with new images and either a whole lot more to catch up on the back catalog or more simply just soft launch weeks or months ahead of time. I hope whoever is in charge of quality just had a coup instead of being blamed for this.
    - protomyth 8y ago
      Sure it takes time, but before the public ever sees anything, I just have a tough time believing they didn't test it on the inventory of images (or at least a large subset) before inflicting it on the public. Improper testing is a PR embarrassment and has real consequences.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
> have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions) Does it actually cost 100s of millions to run? They don't seem to be actively developing it or really doing anything with it other than banning all its content.
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
nitpick: Yahoo paid $1 billion for Tumblr; Verizon/Oauth paid $5 billion for Yahoo, and it’s a bit difficult to guess how much of that is Tumblr. (IMO they paid billions of dollars for the privilege of being the email provider for my parents.)
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Reddit seem to be mainstreaming to some extent, nowhere near this though - perhaps they're navigating a better line?
- justtopost 8y ago
  Idk, I was no longer an active user when they did their user hostile redesign after lots of internal political struggle between conde nast and the volunteer mods that actually run the site. But sweet baby jesus is it bad now. While I used to drop by when linked in a relevant search query, i now know Ill just get a nagware screen and skip it altoghether. Yeah, I know I can switch to desktop mode and reload, but no thanks, I already got your message to me loud and clear. They did at least change more slowly, with gradual trimming of offensive content, and a better subbreddit containment system for those they are allowing to stay for now.
  - razakel 8y ago
    >Yeah, I know I can switch to desktop mode and reload, but no thanks, I already got your message to me loud and clear. When a third-party developer can make a more user-friendly and less crash-prone app than your official one, it might be worth considering that maybe your official app sucks.
criddell 8y ago
> they clearly don't understand what they bought. I think they know exactly what they bought. They are going to see if they can change Tumblr. If that succeeds, great! If not, shut it down. I bet the price of Yahoo including Tumblr and the price of Yahoo excluding Tumblr was more or less the same number.
wolfgke 8y ago
> Oath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions). OK, but where is the problem with NSFW content (which is quite different from porn) for this? I know, I am German, where there is quite a different mentality with this respect (in my hometown I have even seen openly posted bills for a big porn exhibition in Berlin in the past and nobody (except for the churches) was upset). I can understand that many brands do not want their ads placed next to porn. But where is the problem with other NSFW content?
- xnyan 8y ago
  Strong puritanical roots in the united states, pervasive throughout society.
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  Ask any marketer from a large brand (such a BMW or Adidas) -- their "brand safety" rules are very strict, and any kind of NSFW is a big no-no. Its not just hardcore porn.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Advertisers like sexiness but don't like porn because they want their customer base to stay frustrated and chase satisfaction via materialist comsumption. It's a blend of Puritan work ethic with soulless corporate exploitation.
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > and chase satisfaction via materialist comsumption. Sounds like porn to me. ;-)
Latteland 8y ago
Gaah! Yahoo bought Tumblr, Oath/aol/verizon stupidly bought Yahoo for some reason. So Oath is desperate to put more ads on the hunk of junk that was Yahoo. But Oath should be concerned about all the other messy things they bought as Yahoo Inc.

netcan 8y ago

Corporate sensibilities and media... This isn't a new issue. Media like to be edgy, contraversy provacative. Corporate sensibilities is allergic to scandal or contraversy, especially of the "public morals" type.

JulianMorrison 8y ago

To me it feels like a "management removed the free snacks" moment. Doesn't affect me directly, but what it says about how things are changing makes me think "doomed in very short order".

AJ007 8y ago

This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at Verizon are reading this: - Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. - Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes, your business is dead.

jsjohnst 8y ago
> They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-reports-earnings-as-auction-comes-to-close/#579d338c6e09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...
jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
>This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."
jamesholden 8y ago
- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. I mean, can't they see that a lot of traffic flows through tumblr via those interests? Do they not know how much of a loss of usage that this will cause? I legitimately have zero other reason to use tumblr.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  On the contrary, it's probably a small part of their service. The nature of Tumblr is to make it easy to find like minded people, and construct a subset of the site that's full of what you're into. So it's very easy to feel "Tumblr is all left-wing teens" or "Tumblr is all porn" depending on what you go looking for. But Tumblr is a galaxy of niches and I doubt porn was their mainstay. This fact probably caused them to underestimate the disruptive effect of banning it.
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    Actually, I more tend to agree with this article (https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-thi...) that a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant part of Tumblr. Furthermore, my impression of Tumblr was that it had quite a bit of artists. Most artist-oriented platforms have policies that aim at banning the more overt commercial pornography, while allowing artistic nudity or erotica with appropriate tags (see DeviantArt, Vimeo, etc.) I was actually quite surprised that Tumblr didn't try this route at first to be honest. From what I can tell the "adult content ban" Tumblr implemented is way overly broad-based, not to mention very US-moral attitude centric (eg "female presenting nipples" is less of a big deal in many countries).
    - JulianMorrison 8y ago
protomyth 8y ago
Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. This is the part I really don't understand. Wouldn't you do a test run through their site and do some checking? You cannot claim you don't have examples available.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Image analysis takes time. You’d have X servers to deal with new images and either a whole lot more to catch up on the back catalog or more simply just soft launch weeks or months ahead of time. I hope whoever is in charge of quality just had a coup instead of being blamed for this.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    Sure it takes time, but before the public ever sees anything, I just have a tough time believing they didn't test it on the inventory of images (or at least a large subset) before inflicting it on the public. Improper testing is a PR embarrassment and has real consequences.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

> have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions) Does it actually cost 100s of millions to run? They don't seem to be actively developing it or really doing anything with it other than banning all its content.

Eric_WVGG 8y ago

nitpick: Yahoo paid $1 billion for Tumblr; Verizon/Oauth paid $5 billion for Yahoo, and it’s a bit difficult to guess how much of that is Tumblr. (IMO they paid billions of dollars for the privilege of being the email provider for my parents.)

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Reddit seem to be mainstreaming to some extent, nowhere near this though - perhaps they're navigating a better line?

justtopost 8y ago
Idk, I was no longer an active user when they did their user hostile redesign after lots of internal political struggle between conde nast and the volunteer mods that actually run the site. But sweet baby jesus is it bad now. While I used to drop by when linked in a relevant search query, i now know Ill just get a nagware screen and skip it altoghether. Yeah, I know I can switch to desktop mode and reload, but no thanks, I already got your message to me loud and clear. They did at least change more slowly, with gradual trimming of offensive content, and a better subbreddit containment system for those they are allowing to stay for now.
- razakel 8y ago
  >Yeah, I know I can switch to desktop mode and reload, but no thanks, I already got your message to me loud and clear. When a third-party developer can make a more user-friendly and less crash-prone app than your official one, it might be worth considering that maybe your official app sucks.

criddell 8y ago

> they clearly don't understand what they bought. I think they know exactly what they bought. They are going to see if they can change Tumblr. If that succeeds, great! If not, shut it down. I bet the price of Yahoo including Tumblr and the price of Yahoo excluding Tumblr was more or less the same number.

wolfgke 8y ago

> Oath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions). OK, but where is the problem with NSFW content (which is quite different from porn) for this? I know, I am German, where there is quite a different mentality with this respect (in my hometown I have even seen openly posted bills for a big porn exhibition in Berlin in the past and nobody (except for the churches) was upset). I can understand that many brands do not want their ads placed next to porn. But where is the problem with other NSFW content?

xnyan 8y ago
Strong puritanical roots in the united states, pervasive throughout society.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
Ask any marketer from a large brand (such a BMW or Adidas) -- their "brand safety" rules are very strict, and any kind of NSFW is a big no-no. Its not just hardcore porn.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Advertisers like sexiness but don't like porn because they want their customer base to stay frustrated and chase satisfaction via materialist comsumption. It's a blend of Puritan work ethic with soulless corporate exploitation.
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > and chase satisfaction via materialist comsumption. Sounds like porn to me. ;-)

Latteland 8y ago

Gaah! Yahoo bought Tumblr, Oath/aol/verizon stupidly bought Yahoo for some reason. So Oath is desperate to put more ads on the hunk of junk that was Yahoo. But Oath should be concerned about all the other messy things they bought as Yahoo Inc.