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> Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography. This is a common talking point here, but it just isn't historically accurat

> Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography. This is a common talking point here, but it just isn't historically accurate in terms of absolute numbers. Tumblr was most successful in 2011-2012. It started getting huge in 2010 in large part due to having built-in photo and video support, at a time when Twitter didn't have these, and Instagram and Pinterest were still both tiny. Tumblr also offered built-in reblog functionality before Twitter had built-in retweeting. For a little while there, Tumblr was a mainstream social network -- certainly a bit edgier and more liberal than most competitors, but still mainstream enough that many major brands had a Tumblr presence right alongside their Facebook and Twitter icons. Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels. A lot of those mainstream users started to decamp to Instagram and Pinterest after that point, depending on their personal use-case. That adult content percentage definitely rose over time, but timing-wise that coincided with total traffic decreasing, not increasing. It also scared off the brands, whose advertising dollars were sorely needed to achieve sustainability for the business. So to me, attempting to attribute Tumblr's "success" to adult content just seems way off-base. Source: I was personally responsible for a decent chunk of Tumblr's scalability and capacity planning for several years.

photomatt 3y ago
I think this is a pretty fair assessment.
jchw 3y ago
Seems like a reasonable take but I do have one comment: > Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels. Single-digit percentage is a lot for adult content. I have to imagine that's a larger share of percentage than Twitter has ever had for adult content.
- evanelias 3y ago
  That's expected given Twitter leans more towards text content. The proportion of Tumblr posts that are images or video has always been much higher than Twitter's. Twitter didn't even have built-in photo posts until mid 2011, and even then it was through a third-party integration with Photobucket for the first year. Images weren't shown inline in the Twitter timeline feed until late 2013! Meanwhile direct video upload was added even later than that.
  - jchw 3y ago
    What I'm trying to say is, to me, that just generally sounds like a pretty large share of adult content no matter how you shake it. I could be over-estimating, but I'd assume it outpaces all of the other major social media platforms and most websites of similar magnitude in general that do allow pornographic content but are not explicitly porn sites.
    - evanelias 3y ago
      OK, but I'm not understanding your point. I mean it's all relative. Go back 10-15 years earlier and a very large percentage of uuencoded files uploaded to Usenet were adult content. That doesn't mean NNTP or uuencode were primarily for porn. On the web, similar situation for DeviantArt and a lot of other sites.
      - jchw 3y ago
        Exactly. I always assumed porn's role in Tumblr was a bit exaggerated, but actually it seems like it really was pretty big, especially considering that we're talking about something that was far, far, far more mainstream than Usenet. (and thus at least in my mind, you'd expect it to be smaller by percentage.) > DeviantArt Of course it's complicated. DeviantArt never really allowed pornographic content, but obviously it wound up with a lot of fetish content that blurred the lines regardless. DeviantArt is basically a case study all on its own.
- photomatt 3y ago
  There's different ways to count it, but I'd estimate it was maybe a low % of posts but it was 30-40% of the user interest and traffic.
no_wizard 3y ago
It seems like a missing part of this was lack of ad safety council on Tumblrs part. Reddit has been getting away with it for over a decade (NSFW content I mean) without losing advertisers. I see a ton of mainstream ads on Reddit (I use their official app, for better or worse) I don't think its simply the existence of NSFW content that makes advertisers wary. I think its lack of guarantees w/r/t placement

photomatt 3y ago

I think this is a pretty fair assessment.

jchw 3y ago

Seems like a reasonable take but I do have one comment: > Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels. Single-digit percentage is a lot for adult content. I have to imagine that's a larger share of percentage than Twitter has ever had for adult content.

evanelias 3y ago
That's expected given Twitter leans more towards text content. The proportion of Tumblr posts that are images or video has always been much higher than Twitter's. Twitter didn't even have built-in photo posts until mid 2011, and even then it was through a third-party integration with Photobucket for the first year. Images weren't shown inline in the Twitter timeline feed until late 2013! Meanwhile direct video upload was added even later than that.
- jchw 3y ago
  What I'm trying to say is, to me, that just generally sounds like a pretty large share of adult content no matter how you shake it. I could be over-estimating, but I'd assume it outpaces all of the other major social media platforms and most websites of similar magnitude in general that do allow pornographic content but are not explicitly porn sites.
  - evanelias 3y ago
    OK, but I'm not understanding your point. I mean it's all relative. Go back 10-15 years earlier and a very large percentage of uuencoded files uploaded to Usenet were adult content. That doesn't mean NNTP or uuencode were primarily for porn. On the web, similar situation for DeviantArt and a lot of other sites.
    - jchw 3y ago
      Exactly. I always assumed porn's role in Tumblr was a bit exaggerated, but actually it seems like it really was pretty big, especially considering that we're talking about something that was far, far, far more mainstream than Usenet. (and thus at least in my mind, you'd expect it to be smaller by percentage.) > DeviantArt Of course it's complicated. DeviantArt never really allowed pornographic content, but obviously it wound up with a lot of fetish content that blurred the lines regardless. DeviantArt is basically a case study all on its own.
photomatt 3y ago
There's different ways to count it, but I'd estimate it was maybe a low % of posts but it was 30-40% of the user interest and traffic.

no_wizard 3y ago

It seems like a missing part of this was lack of ad safety council on Tumblrs part. Reddit has been getting away with it for over a decade (NSFW content I mean) without losing advertisers. I see a ton of mainstream ads on Reddit (I use their official app, for better or worse) I don't think its simply the existence of NSFW content that makes advertisers wary. I think its lack of guarantees w/r/t placement