Verizon reportedly seeking to sell Tumblr
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As a sex positive liberal, I admit a certain level of schadenfreude at seeing tumblr's decision bite them in the butt. Using child porn as a pretext to justify a puritanical purge of all erotic content is absolutely obnoxious IMO.
And not what Tumblr did - their erotic content ban was under way before the CP snafu got them temporarily kicked out of the iOS App Store. Consensus is that it saves them from SESTA-FOSTA legal troubles.
Plenty of porn subreddits around that could be used for sex trafficking particularly private ones.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/bdwlin/update_to...
Fewer, and lower discoverability. If you ban a sub, the mods have to bother registering a new one, and if you ban the mods too I believe they'll need to 'break in' new accounts to do that. Once they do, it'll just be an empty sub sitting there passively until they promote it on other subs (where it'll draw reports) or on other sites (which is a hassle). And without active moderation, spam users destroy spam subs by overwhelming their intentional content.
On tumblr, a new account just takes a new email, and they can be 'promoted' easily because following real users or reblogging their content with ads sends them notifications. It's pretty much the ideal structure for automation-friendly spam.
They got kicked off the app store in november, and moved to ban all porn in december. They might have been planning this all along, but I've seen no evidence for that.
Why was this legislation pushed through so quickly without any opposition like SOPA or PIPA?
I don't get the "why".
Who was behind this?
"New statistics shared by the San Francisco police show... sex trafficking shot up 170 percent in 2018." https://www.dailydot.com/irl/increase-sex-trafficking-sesta-... They claim it's just improved reporting because of increased outreach.
"DiAngelo says she received calls from women who are suicidal because they’ve been forced to work on the streets and return to dangerous pimps." https://www.kalw.org/post/one-year-federal-law-curb-sex-traf...
"Breyer estimated that there were about double or triple the usual number of workers seeking assistance." https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17306486/sex-work-online-f...
"online private group chats where sex workers could share survival strategies and harm reduction techniques to stay safe have also disappeared" https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/anti-s... (Banner image kinda NSFW)
Here's an actual survey of sex workers in Seattle. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KBsVBQh7EsRexAyZacaf... (results start on slide 7)
And it's had effects internationally. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex-work...
Oath apparently viewed the adult content as a nonstarter for monetization and a general threat to advertiser relationships. Since both the site's design and its massive engineering flaws meant adult content showed up anywhere, it was even driving advertisers away from not-necessarily-adult content like user feeds, and there was some concern it was even keeping user counts down.
Of course, the entire plan here was nuts. Oath apparently wanted to double user counts by summer 2019, even though growth was effectively zero and there was no plan to fix that. They confused an adult content problem with a spam problem, and so the spam is still going strong. And the monetization outlook is genuinely hilarious: Oath intended to ban adult content as a step to monetizing the site's fandom and social justice communities. Apparently nobody noticed that the fandom stuff was the porn they were banning, or that a solid 20% of all users were going to be affected.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn...
No longer can you see a nipple on Tumblr (well, you can, but that seems like what they're going for in blocking content), but a few errant clicks can easily find you in hardcore Tumblr bestiality territory that's apparently survived unscathed.
Classic comic from years ago
A savvy enterprise that acquired it should re-allow adult content with however many filters they like to make amends with the community and devote a while to redo UX and quality of life. Content creators will absolutely come back, as no proper competitor ever rose in the current vacuum yet. After that it could turn into a unicorn in less than a year.
I thought Reddit has never been profitable?
The whole GDPR, Content Filtering thing seems like a massive opportunity for a savvy, unregulated South American, African or Asian company to take advantage of.
Why lump privacy protections together with upload filters as if they're both bad. If you service doesn't abide by the GDPR, I'd try to avoid it. On the other hand, upload filters are a disaster and not at all comparable to GDPR, not in terms of what they do to the end-user, not the burden they place on service providers.
For what it's worth, it would only have to be out side Europe. If a firm has no office in Europe, it would be difficult for Europe to enforce its laws. Extradition requires it be a crime in both countries.
There seems to be a growing reluctance to accept that a person or a group being allowed to exist on a platform does not in any way serve as an endorsement of that person or group. I believe that the copyright legislation in Europe, for example, has very little to do with copyright, and very much to do with holding platforms accountable for the content that their users produce. The net result is the platforms necessarily invoke nuance-less strategies for sanitizing the content according to a narrow band of what is acceptable.
Europe's Article 13 and its companion will make sure that NEVER happens.
> How is that inconsistent? Both things are a law.
On the one hand, Article 13 compromises the online publishing capability of anyone (either individuals or businesses) who lack the ability to hire both large legal departments and large developer teams who can implement content filters. It entrenches the power of the 800lb media gorillas and kneecaps everyone else. It also enables censorship systems by crippling the capability of individuals and small hosting businesses to publish material at will.
But on the other hand, the GDPR is a law with serious teeth that takes power back from those 800lb gorillas that rely on unethical bulk-surveillance business models. It empowers individuals to regain some privacy should they choose to exercise that power. Businesses with ethical user-fee business models have nothing to fear from the GDPR, because for them, the protection of customer data from advertisers isn't an undue hardship. It's a core feature of their service. And let's not forget that the GDPR actually has quite broad exceptions for news agencies. The GDPR can't be used as a censorship tool in the same way that Article 13 can.
The EU audience merely has to be willing to tolerate the latency of being served content from outside of the EU.
The only answer that the EU has to that approach, is to institute a Chinese style blockade and limit access to the Internet (it would become something else, the EUnet, with restricted access to the Internet). The question is whether EU citizens will tolerate that next, required step. Without an EU wall, they can't stop the trivial dodging of their laws by setting up services outside of their jurisdiction and serving to EU users. The US market is profitable enough to trivially support serving to EU users without any regard for making money there (Facebook could operate profitably with 2.2 billion global monthly actives with only monetizing the US market; Google could serve its search engine to a global audience profitably by only monetizing the US).
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.
Those users probably consume some safe content.
Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...
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.
* 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.
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.
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
> 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.
Do you have sources for that? Because from what I know, I think that's unlikely.
Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".
> The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news.
That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.
> So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation.
Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?
Hired a couple of their SREs
> Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".
Tumblr has a boatload of porn. They barely killed half of it if based on random samples some of their competitors did before and after the great purge. The biggest change is that they started to kill ability to re-share old porn content but re-uploaded copies of the same old porn still show up.
> That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.
We see the outrage playing out daily in the news. If Pepsi ends up in a hot water with the ad featuring Kandall giving a soda to a cop one does not need to be a genius to predict what happens in a case of Orbits ad next to a porn video.
> Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?
It deserving to exist is irrelevant. Someone needs to fund it or make enough money to make it worth to them.
This ads first mentality for profitability is stupid. Lastly throw in an ad here or there for different musicians under their respective tags if you want ads. Talk about contextual advertising that wouldnt bother me if I had seen it. Like maybe a band is doing a concert in my own bam!
The way I used Tumblr I may of paid $10 a month for a premium account if they just made it all the worthwhile. They also provide asset hosting for free. Come on!
https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/could-have-should-ha...
Anyway, it's "could/should/would have" which in its contracted form is "could've" / "should've" / "would've".
If you were going to only include a link, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/could-of-or-could-ha... would have been a better choice, for example.
Second, ads don't need payment methods. Kids and teenagers may not have debit or credit cards, but are a hugely valuable demographic that advertisers want to target. So as long as Twitch stays relevant to those audiences, ads will probably be quite valuable.
Twitch gets around this now by integrating the ads directly into the video stream before it even hits your browser, so there is no way for a simple ad-blocker that blacklists domains to tell when the stream is streaming an ad vs the actual content.
Most publishers put up with adblocking because most ad companies offer "set it and forget it" solutions. Just drop a piece of JS into their HTML and they start earning money. Eventually publishers will get their ads via a REST API or something (server side) and splice the ads directly into the HTML themselves, so that the ad-blocker won't know what is content and what is ads.
At that point, ad blockers just have to make their best guess at which HTML elements (div/span/etc.) contain ads by checking names, dimensions, and other features and deleting that element.
I think their might be laws that say you have to explicitly label ads or sponsored content as such, so that might make it easier.
BTW, the finance industry is even bigger, and has a correspondingly larger effect on how the tech industry really works. I've even seen it said that Silicon Valley is basically just a (not so) well disguised extension of Wall Street, and it's not wrong.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: sell it for a loss!
EDIT: I looked it up because I wasn't sure about the details. Man, what a rabbit hole. There is even a Wikipedia page about money burning and its legality in various jurisdictions[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
For a business that means yes, you can.
For individuals that means no, you can't, unless there's a special exception such as losing your cash in a federally declared disaster.
If you're both and the assets are mixed (e.g. operating budget and retirement account are both kept under your mattress), I imagine the IRS would presume the cash was personal and it'd be difficult to argue otherwise.
I'm not an accountant but have studied basic tax law. I only briefly Googled to make sure I'm not patently misrepresenting things, though.
I'm pretty sure the Tumblr acquisition by Verizon was just part of some bigger deal that involved bailing out some of the investors with an 'exit'. Yahoo was imploding and that was inconvenient to a lot of investors. Companies like Verizon have plenty of money and lots of ties to the same investors. Many of which probably benefited from this kind of controlled demolition. It was never about salvaging something of value; just about bailing out investors. Verizon can absorb the loss. I doubt this will have big consequences for any of their leadership. The next phase in Tumblrs life will be hedgefunds stripping what remains of value. It's a dead company at this point. Anyone with a clue probably bailed before Yahoo sold out to Verizon and most of the rest probably left right after.
The "bigger deal" was the sale of all of Yahoo's business to Verizon, which was an all-or-nothing-deal.
Would anyone like to buy this nice stump?
edit: I should add that it adds to the overall destruction of a forest ecosystem and I don't agree with it on large-scales.
A bunch of blogs?
Mostly selling ads, but they are working on video too.
Yahoo never monetized Tumblr, but I don't think they did anything particularly wrong with it.
In the same way that didn’t stop Verizon..
You know what we need? A federal agency to enforce communications laws and stuff. Some sort of federal commission, having to do with communications.
There should be zero bonuses or incentive payments for the executive group that made this decision. The effect was predictable and widely forecast.
Not only that, but pornhub (for the most part) has a somewhat different sort of reputation than Yahoo and Verizon. Yahoo has been dying for eons and verizon is, well, verizon. Tumblr is likely to get some traffic simply for being owned by Pornhub as well.
Good luck with the sale.
It was a poor experience lacking in engagement. Using Instagram and Reddit was much more fulfilling in creative and online social/community needs.
Tumblr's numbers were flat lining before they removed porn. I know this because my friend was a Tumblr engineer and would share data from their all hands meetings.
FOSTA became law in April 2018.
So please explain to us how FOSTA was responsible for Tumblr's demise.
Don't run it as a porn site, but run it as an art site for adults.
Restore all the adult content.
Make a decent mobile app, where viewers can like or tip easily.
Help creators get paid, using Pornhub's leverage with their financial institutions
And even if they were, the community is gone, and you can't just rebuild that.
Not necessarily if the reason was (as people think) to avoid SESTA-FOSTA legal problems. Pornhub would still need to work around those restrictions and it might simply not be economical.
That makes it different from Instagram which is focused on original content with little discussion. Reddit which is focused on new content with much heavier focus on discussion. Facebook which is supposed to be for personal content with familiar people.
I also heard the rumor that PornHub was interested in buying it. I hope they do! Can you imagine how quickly all the corporate blogs would scramble off of the platform to avoid association with a porn site!?
https://popculture.com/trending/2019/05/02/pornhub-intereste...