Comment by markx2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markx2 | Hacker News Reader

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I have no knowledge of how Reddit handles NSFW content. I have some knowledge of how Automattic does.

From what I have seen as an active reddit user of 10yrs+, the ads I see on - for example - /r/culinaryskills, /r/gamedeals, /r/dogs - are quite different. They are targeted in some way.

All WordPress.com sites - and I assume tumblr sites - could have ads shown. One way to stop ads being shown on those sites is to apply a tag.

Call that tag "mature"

A site tagged as "mature" will

- not appear to other sites

- will therefore experience a drop-off in traffic

- but will still appear in Google but because of the lack of linking will be much much lower in results.

Reddit cannot add those tags as fast and (maybe) as accurately as a blogging service can so it gets away with it. That said, they do have the ability to quarantine sites and I have no idea at all if they hide NSFW content from crawlers.

The vast majority of Tumblr traffic is via logged-in users hitting the dashboard (activity stream of posts from followed users), global tag pages, etc. It's a social network, and most pages with ads are displaying content from a bunch of different blogs at once. It's just like the Twitter timeline.

Tumblr has already long had a notion of NSFW blogs and content, which are already treated differently than "safe" content. But since the blog network (individual "sites" as you're saying) is a minority of traffic, and not a major source of revenue in the first place, it's not really comparable to isolating mature content on WordPress or Reddit.

So you are saying there appears to be a way (likely nontrivial) that Tumblr could adopt (maybe same as reddit) to keep both advertisers and community happy?

No.

A subreddit could, depending on it's (unpaid) mods have a wide variety of content. For example /r/WTF content could be funny or shocking. An advertiser on that sub would have to be okay with their content being alongside either content.

Let's say a tumblr site gets tagged as "mature".

That site does not get the expected ads normally seen on a site

That site is effectively invisible to other sites

Why would you buy ads on a site that no-one will see?

Why would you stay publishing on a site where your traffic falls of a cliff?

What makes a site get that 'mature' tag? It could be one post, it could be a series of posts. But that tag stays until it manually removed.

When you are running a site that has user generated content there are two alternatives:

- Being clean

- Being seen to be clean

Tag filtering helps the latter.

I think we are saying the same thing. Tumblr could operate the same way as reddit and enjoy similar ad revenue.

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