So Tumblr died because it was dependent on porn traffic? If that is the case, they were already “dead” (or at least not worth hundreds of millions), and Apple’s rules had nothing to do with it.
Maybe Tumblr should have taken a page out of Apple's book and had reviewers.
1) The definition of porn is fluid - adhering to an external third party's guidelines (Apple's) will always mean adopting an overly strict definition to ensure confidence in compliance
2) Moderation is a hard problem - false positives will always happen, and given point (1) above will happen a LOT in the case of Tumblr
However, calling tumblr "dead" as a result of it does seem to imply such a problem. Their business model was ads, that doesn't inherently exempt porn in any way.
traffic measured in visitors or bytes downloaded? any source?
Even as someone who really doesn't have a problem with porn, I'm not going to spend 3 hours watching it, while I definitely have spent 3 hours watching youtube on many many occasions. There's also only one of the two that's going to be serving as background noise during working hours... Or that someone is going to put on to entertain their kids.
I suspect it's bullshit.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/the-fight-to-h...
Regardless, you're totally right that their numbers are relatively impressive and indeed "Google-scale" if we interpret that as within an order of magnitude. If the metric they used was "unique visitors per employee," then even with official source numbers they would be around 10x as successful as Google!!
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201889/most-visited-web...