{{Title link: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom }}
A lot of good info and comments here; I’m glad they got a chance to talk to @pervocracy in particular.
For the tl;dr, the big news here is that banning NSFW has been in the works for some time and was simply rushed out the door due to the app thing, and the real motivation is that few ad buyers are willing to buy ads that might show up next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just before the Verizon acquisition, [former head of media brands Simon] Khalaf was insisting the staff figure out how to better monetize.
This explains a number of things that were hard to contextualize at the time: the insistence on repeatedly turning on safe mode for everybody, and the push for non-chronological feeds, were likely intended to help increase the amount of “safe” pagespace they could sell higher-value ads on.
I’d noticed for a while that Tumblr was pushing the fandom angle very hard – the Radar and other highlight features are extremely fanart-oriented, and that was clearly also part of the motivation behind algorithmic feeds. However, I’d been presuming that this was just to facilitate marketing of the actual brands in question, like “pay Tumblr to highlight fandom content for your show so more people will get into it.” It sounds like they actually wanted to use fandoms as a general marketing demographic, which is a bit more ambitious but also makes more sense – you might want to reach MCU fans not just for MCU stuff but also for unrelated products that had conceptual crossover.
If that’s the case, though, it means that the ban was even more foolhardy than I thought, since fandoms are going to be the first thing to vacate – sites like Dreamwidth are natural fits for that, and not only are they among the least tolerant of strict anti-NSFW guidelines, but they’re also the most likely to post the kind of SFW visual art that Tumblr is flagging for deletion because their algorithms suck.
Tags:
#hmm #interesting #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse
Brinens and Things 