4 ms·

The problem with adult content is that it is not monetizable via regular ads. This means that Tumblr is either: 1) a porn site with porn ads which is not a sex

The problem with adult content is that it is not monetizable via regular ads. This means that Tumblr is either: 1) a porn site with porn ads which is not a sexy business to be in -- at best it is a lifestyle business. 2) a site providing tools to small porn businesses ( i.e. creators of adult content ) for money which has a very limited growth and is a tough market 3) a site charging users for access to edgy content None of this so far has been a multi-billion dollar entreprise.

huffmsa 8y ago
They could take a look at what Nishimura did by splitting 4chan into a work and advertiser safe 4channel.org and the unsafe 4chan.org domains.
- notyourday 8y ago
  The moment it is split into the "safe" and "unsafe" it becomes immediately obvious that "unsafe" loses gobs of money while "safe" makes a tiny bit of money, which is exactly why the non-safe content gets purged ( in case of Tumblr, badly -- there's still lots of porn on it ).
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    But purging the content meant 30% of their users left literally overnight. Those users probably consume some safe content.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      It is numbers: if the cost of servicing those users in a non-safe content is X, they are worth it only if the revenue received from them in a non-safe content Y is either ~X or > X. Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.
      - ryan_j_naughton 8y ago
        Not if there is an ecosystem effect, and you need those people to ensure that all the safe content has enough producers, consumers, commenters, etc to make it a living, community and ecosystem.
        notyourday 8y ago
        Those effects did not work for Tumblr. Tumblr always lost money. That's exactly how it ended up in this situation.
    - RenRav 8y ago
      What's interesting is that the content doesn't seem purged. All the accounts with porn just have their blogs hidden, but like 90% of the images and such are still hosted and can be directly accessed. Someone could easily reverse this and slap on monetization features, because even today there doesn't seem to be any decent tumblr replacement, not reddit, not twitter. That seems unlikely to happen though.
      - notyourday 8y ago
        That gets us back to Tumblr being a money losing enterprise. The question is what is a working strategy to monetize a massive user content driven platform where advertisers view on that content is somewhere between the gigantic landfill on fire and a nuclear waste.
        RenRav 8y ago
        Seems Pornhub is one solution after all, it sure solves the advertising problem... they just put up their own advertisements. > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornhub-wants-to-buy-tumblr-and-restore-site-to-former-porn-filled-glory/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...
      - danaris 8y ago
        As I understand it (as a light Tumblr user, in areas adjacent to but almost entirely outside of the NSFW sections), a significant number of the porn blogs have, in fact, been deleted, as well as a significant number of blogs or posts on blogs that were flagged as porn by their egregiously terrible porn-finding algorithm, but were in fact nothing of the kind. However, the porn spambots still keep popping up periodically, and there are still loads of Nazi/alt-right blogs that Tumblr doesn't seem to have any intention of doing anything about.
      - Izkata 8y ago
        That is in fact exactly what happened. The implementation was rushed and/or inept to the point it's near-impossible for me to believe this was something they were already working on: * Tumblrs that weren't marked adult got marked as such by their new algorithm. This included the text-only official announcement post itself. * The actual block was done by turning on safe mode for all users, and removing the toggle from the settings page. For a short time, some people were supposedly able to turn in back off by adding that setting back to the POST manually. * The setting doesn't affect your dashboard, so you can still see new posts by those you follow, even though there's no way to browse to their page directly.
  - terryschiavo22 8y ago
    4chan doesn't exist to make a profit though. It only needs to get enough money to keep the lights on.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      Which makes it not a business and not valueable unless someone wants to fund it.
danaris 8y ago
Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads. It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that. Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.
- notyourday 8y ago
  > Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads. Most of the cost and page views on Tumblr came from NSFW. Everything else was a really long tail. It costs more money to monetize the long tail than the long tail can be monetized for. > It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that Advertisers for non-explicit content to not want to be associated with non-clean content whatever that not clean content may be. Tucker Carlson is much cleaner than "daddybeatshisproperty" and there are successful campaigns to pull P&G and its likes ads from Fox News. Now imagine "Dirty Mouth, clean it up!" ad next to ... well... something something in your mouth. The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news. There's no way Mars, Inc would be Ok with that hit and they are rather edgy in their commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE > Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable. Right. So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation. P.S. Reality does not care about downvotes. Tumblr lost money since its inception because it cannot get enough ad money to coverts its costs. And it cannot get enough ad money because of its content, not because there's no ad money.
  - 8y ago

huffmsa 8y ago

They could take a look at what Nishimura did by splitting 4chan into a work and advertiser safe 4channel.org and the unsafe 4chan.org domains.

notyourday 8y ago
The moment it is split into the "safe" and "unsafe" it becomes immediately obvious that "unsafe" loses gobs of money while "safe" makes a tiny bit of money, which is exactly why the non-safe content gets purged ( in case of Tumblr, badly -- there's still lots of porn on it ).
- huffmsa 8y ago
  But purging the content meant 30% of their users left literally overnight. Those users probably consume some safe content.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    It is numbers: if the cost of servicing those users in a non-safe content is X, they are worth it only if the revenue received from them in a non-safe content Y is either ~X or > X. Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.
    - ryan_j_naughton 8y ago
      Not if there is an ecosystem effect, and you need those people to ensure that all the safe content has enough producers, consumers, commenters, etc to make it a living, community and ecosystem.
      - notyourday 8y ago
        Those effects did not work for Tumblr. Tumblr always lost money. That's exactly how it ended up in this situation.
  - RenRav 8y ago
    What's interesting is that the content doesn't seem purged. All the accounts with porn just have their blogs hidden, but like 90% of the images and such are still hosted and can be directly accessed. Someone could easily reverse this and slap on monetization features, because even today there doesn't seem to be any decent tumblr replacement, not reddit, not twitter. That seems unlikely to happen though.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      That gets us back to Tumblr being a money losing enterprise. The question is what is a working strategy to monetize a massive user content driven platform where advertisers view on that content is somewhere between the gigantic landfill on fire and a nuclear waste.
      - RenRav 8y ago
        Seems Pornhub is one solution after all, it sure solves the advertising problem... they just put up their own advertisements. > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornhub-wants-to-buy-tumblr-and-restore-site-to-former-porn-filled-glory/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...
    - danaris 8y ago
      As I understand it (as a light Tumblr user, in areas adjacent to but almost entirely outside of the NSFW sections), a significant number of the porn blogs have, in fact, been deleted, as well as a significant number of blogs or posts on blogs that were flagged as porn by their egregiously terrible porn-finding algorithm, but were in fact nothing of the kind. However, the porn spambots still keep popping up periodically, and there are still loads of Nazi/alt-right blogs that Tumblr doesn't seem to have any intention of doing anything about.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      That is in fact exactly what happened. The implementation was rushed and/or inept to the point it's near-impossible for me to believe this was something they were already working on: * Tumblrs that weren't marked adult got marked as such by their new algorithm. This included the text-only official announcement post itself. * The actual block was done by turning on safe mode for all users, and removing the toggle from the settings page. For a short time, some people were supposedly able to turn in back off by adding that setting back to the POST manually. * The setting doesn't affect your dashboard, so you can still see new posts by those you follow, even though there's no way to browse to their page directly.
- terryschiavo22 8y ago
  4chan doesn't exist to make a profit though. It only needs to get enough money to keep the lights on.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    Which makes it not a business and not valueable unless someone wants to fund it.

danaris 8y ago

Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads. It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that. Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.

notyourday 8y ago
> Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads. Most of the cost and page views on Tumblr came from NSFW. Everything else was a really long tail. It costs more money to monetize the long tail than the long tail can be monetized for. > It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that Advertisers for non-explicit content to not want to be associated with non-clean content whatever that not clean content may be. Tucker Carlson is much cleaner than "daddybeatshisproperty" and there are successful campaigns to pull P&G and its likes ads from Fox News. Now imagine "Dirty Mouth, clean it up!" ad next to ... well... something something in your mouth. The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news. There's no way Mars, Inc would be Ok with that hit and they are rather edgy in their commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE > Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable. Right. So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation. P.S. Reality does not care about downvotes. Tumblr lost money since its inception because it cannot get enough ad money to coverts its costs. And it cannot get enough ad money because of its content, not because there's no ad money.
- 8y ago