Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads.

It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that.

Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.

> Most of Tumblr is not, and has never been, NSFW. The fact that the site permits such blogs to exist does not in any way mean that the vast majority of it could not easily support regular ads.

Most of the cost and page views on Tumblr came from NSFW. Everything else was a really long tail. It costs more money to monetize the long tail than the long tail can be monetized for.

> It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that

Advertisers for non-explicit content to not want to be associated with non-clean content whatever that not clean content may be. Tucker Carlson is much cleaner than "daddybeatshisproperty" and there are successful campaigns to pull P&G and its likes ads from Fox News. Now imagine "Dirty Mouth, clean it up!" ad next to ... well... something something in your mouth. The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news. There's no way Mars, Inc would be Ok with that hit and they are rather edgy in their commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE

> Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.

Right. So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation.

P.S. Reality does not care about downvotes. Tumblr lost money since its inception because it cannot get enough ad money to coverts its costs. And it cannot get enough ad money because of its content, not because there's no ad money.

> Most of the cost and page views on Tumblr came from NSFW.

Do you have sources for that? Because from what I know, I think that's unlikely.

Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".

> The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news.

That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.

> So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation.

Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?

> Do you have sources for that? Because from what I know, I think that's unlikely.

Hired a couple of their SREs

> Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".

Tumblr has a boatload of porn. They barely killed half of it if based on random samples some of their competitors did before and after the great purge. The biggest change is that they started to kill ability to re-share old porn content but re-uploaded copies of the same old porn still show up.

> That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.

We see the outrage playing out daily in the news. If Pepsi ends up in a hot water with the ad featuring Kandall giving a soda to a cop one does not need to be a genius to predict what happens in a case of Orbits ad next to a porn video.

> Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?

It deserving to exist is irrelevant. Someone needs to fund it or make enough money to make it worth to them.

They could take a look at what Nishimura did by splitting 4chan into a work and advertiser safe 4channel.org and the unsafe 4chan.org domains.

The moment it is split into the "safe" and "unsafe" it becomes immediately obvious that "unsafe" loses gobs of money while "safe" makes a tiny bit of money, which is exactly why the non-safe content gets purged ( in case of Tumblr, badly -- there's still lots of porn on it ).

But purging the content meant 30% of their users left literally overnight.

Those users probably consume some safe content.

What's interesting is that the content doesn't seem purged. All the accounts with porn just have their blogs hidden, but like 90% of the images and such are still hosted and can be directly accessed. Someone could easily reverse this and slap on monetization features, because even today there doesn't seem to be any decent tumblr replacement, not reddit, not twitter. That seems unlikely to happen though.

That is in fact exactly what happened. The implementation was rushed and/or inept to the point it's near-impossible for me to believe this was something they were already working on:

* Tumblrs that weren't marked adult got marked as such by their new algorithm. This included the text-only official announcement post itself.

* The actual block was done by turning on safe mode for all users, and removing the toggle from the settings page. For a short time, some people were supposedly able to turn in back off by adding that setting back to the POST manually.

* The setting doesn't affect your dashboard, so you can still see new posts by those you follow, even though there's no way to browse to their page directly.

That gets us back to Tumblr being a money losing enterprise. The question is what is a working strategy to monetize a massive user content driven platform where advertisers view on that content is somewhere between the gigantic landfill on fire and a nuclear waste.

Seems Pornhub is one solution after all, it sure solves the advertising problem... they just put up their own advertisements.

> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...

As I understand it (as a light Tumblr user, in areas adjacent to but almost entirely outside of the NSFW sections), a significant number of the porn blogs have, in fact, been deleted, as well as a significant number of blogs or posts on blogs that were flagged as porn by their egregiously terrible porn-finding algorithm, but were in fact nothing of the kind.

However, the porn spambots still keep popping up periodically, and there are still loads of Nazi/alt-right blogs that Tumblr doesn't seem to have any intention of doing anything about.

It is numbers: if the cost of servicing those users in a non-safe content is X, they are worth it only if the revenue received from them in a non-safe content Y is either ~X or > X.

Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.

Not if there is an ecosystem effect, and you need those people to ensure that all the safe content has enough producers, consumers, commenters, etc to make it a living, community and ecosystem.

Those effects did not work for Tumblr. Tumblr always lost money. That's exactly how it ended up in this situation.

4chan doesn't exist to make a profit though. It only needs to get enough money to keep the lights on.

Which makes it not a business and not valueable unless someone wants to fund it.