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Comment by levi0214 | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't Pornhub acquire Tumblr?

Could you give us more information about this, since Pornhub once said they wanted to acquire Tumblr.

Hmm, this raises the question: why hasn't Pornhub (or anyone) started a successful X-rated Tumblr clone yet? The demand seems to be there.

Yeah, I was thinking exactly the same question.

This also raises other questions:

What is the difference between Pornhub and a pornographic Tumblr? What is the essential demand behind the demand for a pornographic Tubmlr?

A very interesting phenomenon is that since Tumblr announced the ban on adult content, many bloggers have turned to Twitter instead of Pornhub.

I think the difference is in branding/positioning, and therefore the mental state of the person engaging with the site and creating content.

Porn = male gaze-y[1], intentionally and overtly about sexual gratification, less about exploration

A free-wheeling blog site = a place open to the exploration of a number of different aspects of identity, of which sexuality is one of them.

In short: If Pornhub were to create a tumblr clone, they'd inherently be enticing people to _produce porn_ rather than producing content which might happen to be somewhat pornographic. There's a huge mental barrier there for lots of people, even if they happen to enjoy viewing porn or producing sexually explicit imagery.

[1] Yes I know women watch porn, the default assumption of porn viewership is still a cis male audience

The difference is that each tumblr was curated individually and there were also lots of image focused/exclusive tumblrs. This curation by hand + sometimes extremely narrow definition of a tumblrs content allowed one to find exactly what one wanted.

Pornhub is like a swamp, content wise.

Is there a demand for an NSFW-only Tumblr alternative, or was it the mix of content that made Tumblr popular?

I mean personally I think if e.g. pornhub were to launch a product like that, they should make sure that it's not associated with PH or pornography directly. That creates a stigma - "oh, it's that porn blog" - which in my outsider's perspective was never Tumblr's identity.

Anecdotally, the only people I know that used tumblr used it exclusively for porn, lewds, kinks, etc.

There have been multiple.

Who's paying for it?

Users. Paid porn is huge, I'm sure they would have no problem providing it as a paid service. They already have pornhub premium which is apparently very successful

>Pornhub Premium launched in 2015, and now has more than 1 million signups. That's nearly the number of people who subscribe to the Showtime channel's streaming service.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-interesting-things-might-n...

>According to various reports, currently, the porn industry’s net worth is about $97 billion. This money is enough to feed at-least 4.8 billion people a day. Every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. And how much porn industry makes? 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combined.

https://medium.com/@Strange_bt_True/how-big-is-the-porn-indu...

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