If Verizon bought Tumblr with the sole purpose of having one more service to serve ads to, and if banning the adult content move aims to please the advertisers then oh boy, are they in for a nasty surprise.
Tumblr will become a ghost town in days.
Tumblr will become a ghost town in days.
The only other social media network out there with a following that allows near the same level of expression is twitter and I have already seen posts from artists directing their followers there. But twitter is no real substitute to what tumblr offered.
I imagine tumblr's bandwidth costs are going to shrink exponentially.
Perhaps Verizon is gearing up to market it there?
But yes, most artists I know moved away from Tumblr years ago (with great success).
I assume DeviantArt is only focussed on images themselves, and doesn't allow mixing media as trivially as the others, but would love to be corrected.
I just don't get how that keeps on happening when it doesn't seem to be even a good short-termist move.
Whether they'll hold on to it and make it a sustainable income however, is unclear. I personally doubt it because a huge chunk of the Tumblr user base will leave.
In 2016, Motherboard actually did the digging, and discovered a few interesting numbers, categorizing 130M Tumblr users into "producers" of porn, "consumers" (those who follow the producers), and "unintentionally exposed" users who don't follow porn producers but see reblogs from them.
* Only about 1% of users are producers. * About 22% of Tumblr users are consumers. * About 28% of Tumblr users are unintentionally exposed.
So, what happens?
* Obviously, they lose the producers. * They lose some of the consumers, but not all. (Not all of the consumers are there exclusively for porn.) * They lose some of the unintentionally exposed, but probably not most.
They may lose a quarter or more of their userbase this way, sure, but Tumblr's estimates a few years ago for their total user count were over 200M. Maybe that drops down to "only" 150M, or even 100M. But now their hosting costs have dropped dramatically, too. So if advertising revenue increases or even stays the same as it is now, they win. And 100M users is absolutely a big enough audience to bring in advertisers.
It might be slow but if you have no strong reason to be on Tumblr besides everyone having been on Tumblr you will see a slowly building migration away from Tumblr.
And losing 1/4 the user base overnight is a great way to kick off that migration. It only takes one blog in a web of follows jumping ship to motivate all the other producers and the fans of that blog and its related blogs to move to alternatives.
Perhaps this is a neglected downside. By banning porn you will turn a part of your platform into advertisments for your compeditors. Every post from a popular person saying "I'm moving to X" is an advert for X on your platform.
I suspect the bottom line comes down to the bottom line, though; Tumblr has spent over a decade being a pit that absorbs money, and Verizon is not the kind of company that's going to run a service like that as an experiment. They're making a bet that kicking off the pronz will increase ad revenue, and I'm sure they have projections to back that bet up. That doesn't mean the projections are right, of course, but I don't see how a money-losing Tumblr would have continued under Oath. If this bet doesn't work and they shut it down, everyone will say "ha, we told you that you shouldn't have kicked off the pronz," but the pronz ain't never brought in the bucks for them, and we can safely assume "explicitly set out to monetize the pronz" was never in the cards.
However, now it's very likely that I'll find a mediating app -- or I'll be scraping my own feed -- to avoid the inevitable increased influx of advertisements so Verizon will still lose that possible income from me. I suspect many others will take similar measures (less known apps like Tyblr in iOS for example rid you of ads and make your feed sorted by timestamp and not by an "algorithm").
There are former Tumblr staff members on Twitter saying it will lose 50% of the userbase. Losing 50% of the userbase will unquestionably kill the site stone dead.
Something $3/mo, $30/y — and we'll save all your precious work without hassle! Could work for a significant portion of the audience.
As far as content goes, it is constrained by Japanese law, which is mostly more liberal around art with the exception of their oddly specific yet vague censorship requirements.
Japanese culture has a very strange aspect to it, though. It is a rule following culture and they don't readily change the rules. Once you have a law for something, people don't question it. It's the law. It doesn't matter if it's a good law or a bad law. It's just the law and you make do. None of those laws changed in 70 years and unless some outside force puts pressure on the government, I suspect they won't change for another 70 years.
I always find it amusing that Americans, especially, complain about protectionist agriculture policies of Japan. Or American pundits show surprise at the really bizarre censorship laws. All of it was put in place by the Americans -- albeit probably without realising that once a law is in place, it's gong to be there for a long time :-) This is American culture fast forwarded in time 70 years!
WRT to the liberal laws regarding art... well, generally about what constitutes child pornography: if you are drawing something you have pretty much free reign to draw whatever you like. This is (IMHO humorously) constrained by the specific censorship laws (I suppose the 1940's American occupying forces did not consider child pornography). Artists will follow the letter of the law, but then will feel free to draw whatever they want outside of those boundaries.
I believe this is due to a very strong feeling in Japan that what you think is private and up to you. Even discrimination is famously not illegal in Japan. For example, you are free to serve or not to serve any customer for any reason in Japan. It's a pretty big deal for most people. Remember that before the war Japan had no censorship laws. You could depict anything you wanted in art. The current state of affairs is just an extension of that, tiptoeing around the censorship laws imposed by the occupying forces in the 1940's.
Child pornography is reviled here in Japan to pretty much the same extent that it is anywhere I have ever lived (as well as art that depicts rape, or other violent sexual crimes). However, if you draw it rather than photograph it, it is not illegal. If it doesn't involve anyone other than the artist and the viewer, it's nobody's business but theirs. Talking about it publicly is completely not acceptable in normal society, but thinking about it is your own business (even though most people will privately judge if they think you are the kind of person who is interested in that stuff -- but again, that thinking is private and not expressed publicly).
I'm always hesitant to talk about this stuff on a public forum because I don't want to incite a large thread about what should or should not be classed as child pornography. It's one of those things where no matter what opinion you hold, you are going to be seen as a monster by people who hold a different opinion. I just thought people would be interested in some information about why the rules are so strange in Japan.
This is not true. The obscenity censorship law dates back to 1907, and the enforcement of it for erotic content was also completely detatched from the occupation. https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/4pss4u/why_is_porn_i...
Certainly there are other wordpress multi-site powered adult options still out there.
If tumblr keeps the API oAuth stuff working for NSFA blogs then it's simple to import. Hopefully content will still remain available via backend and API past the 17th for blog admins.
A backup, auto-export service would be nice for end users and connected friends / followers, from tumblr, or wordpress or other platforms. You can never trust your content hosted on other people's computers. (or your own for that matter without a good off site backup system in place)
Why even own it then?
Of course now they can't split it back off to live on its own - they'll just kill it instead.
Nobody thinks twice about burning something to the ground, though. Thats just a cost of doing business.
Usually when a large company buys another company with lots of properties, they invest in the ones they like and shut down the ones they don't like and write off the losses. I haven't read of any news about verizon investing in Tubmlr so this seems like verizon slowly shutting down tumblr.
Should be interesting what their plans for other yahoo properties. They shut down yahoo messenger. What are their plans for yahoo portal, news, sports, finance, etc?
I don't understand the need for such PR dances. Nobody believes the carefully crafted copy-paste statement of the CEO anyway.
I don't know that is what verizon is doing. It's just an educated guess on my part. As for the specifics, I'm sure the execs looked at all the data and they are doing what they feel is in the best interest of the shareholders.
My guess is somewhat aligned with yours albeit a bit more cynical -- I think they will try to exctract a stable advertisement revenue channel out of Tumblr but I don't think it will last.
And yeah, you are likely more right -- they mitigate the PR damage and try to prevent staff leaving in droves, plus maximizing shareholder value.