This is in a way a variation of what Playboy did for porn back in the day. You claimed to read it for the articles (and the writing was good) but got to glimpse

This is in a way a variation of what Playboy did for porn back in the day. You claimed to read it for the articles (and the writing was good) but got to glimpse at porn as well. With tumbler quite possibly pornhub is wanting to do the same thing. In other words give people a legit reason to use tumbler (content that is non porn) so they can sneak a peek at porn. Now they can't do that now with pornhub (at least under that brand and domain) and even if they started a new brand from scratch how would they build up non porn ('the articles') content. If the price is right (big if) no doubt this is a legitimate strategy.