I've always said that cheap is better than free. If all services like Tumblr had debuted at a nominal $0.25 or $0.50 a month and that had become normalized as a way to support the platform without mining data or being at the whims of advertisers, the internet might be in a better place.
Instead we have clickbait, engagement addiction and users as products and not customers.
Not just free platforms. No publication supported by advertising is a viable long-term solution let alone a desirable one. Advertising-based publishing was never a good idea. The current state of the press is a good example of that too. Unfortunately, there are not that many viable alternatives. People would pay for good journalism, not sure they would or should pay to reblog memes and other people's posts.
Define what you mean by “long-term.”
America has a number of ad-supported publications that have been publishing for over 250 years. There are probably older ones in Europe and elsewhere.
Indeed the ad-supported model is or was viable in print for a long time, although we started to see a shift there as well. Today the print media is struggling, ad revenue may no longer be enough to keep most publications afloat. The fact this model still works for some titles and was viable for centuries doesn't make it particularly good either. With an ad-based structure, the independent press ideal was flawed from the start.
This i dont understand though. Who wouldn't their product to be subconsciously associated with sexual satisfaction?
I'm also wondering why super-targeted advertising (showing actually relevant, and deeper integrated ads for different pages/posts/videos/etc) is still not a thing, there was a movement towards it but it kind of died down, even as everyone is shouting about ML and AI everywhere.
And to be fair, most of the ads that appear near porn is extremely low quality, so they may be right.
Of course it is a self-perpetuating issue, but that doesn't mean that they can just fix it.
Found it: https://blog.eat24.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/
But Mattel, Sony, GM, Apple, and American Airlines aren't signing up anytime soon. That's the problem for Tumblr.
I think this is just one of those instances in which a customer just starts costing you too much money. Will banning the low-rent crowd make a difference at this point? Who can say really. But keeping them pretty much ensures you will not get access to the deep pocketed advertisers.
Brands were so freaked out to have their dish detergent show up next to an ISIS video because whoever uploaded the video gets their check for $5 or whatever, and then they're literally supporting terrorism.
Advertisers in the current environment can be as picky as they want to be.
https://www.nycpride.org/sponsors/
You should see what happens on and slightly off the floats.
Think of tumblr as nothing but a way to get pageviews for Cheerios and Volvo ads. It explains their decisions perfectly.