Yahoo To Buy Tumblr?
As Tumblr users leave comments on my Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post, it’s becoming clearer that the new robots.txt that prohibits search engines from indexing adult Tumblrs is quite new. But nobody seems to know precisely why Tumblr is newly trying to hide all its adult blogs, and Tumblr still hasn’t responded to my inquiry.
Well, here’s a Time report that Tumblr is in talks to be acquired by Yahoo for big bucks. A potential acquisition like that would certainly explain the urge to scratch kitty litter hastily over the porn that made your system big enough to sell in the first place:
Internet icon Yahoo! is in talks to buy New York-based social blogging platform Tumblr for as much as $1 billion, according to multiple reports. At that price, Tumblr would be pretty expensive, given that it reportedly only booked $13 million in revenue last year, but the deal could still make sense for Yahoo! That’s because Tumblr is extremely popular with the 18-to-24 year-old-set, precisely the demographic CEO Marissa Mayer is targeting as she attempts to turn the purple-hued Internet pioneer around following a multi-year slump.
It’s like I said in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All:
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Note well: Yahoo itself is no friend to adult content. As early as 2001 Yahoo started hiding adult Yahoo Groups from its own directories and site search, making them very hard to find. And adult Yahoo Groups used to be (it’s been some years since I stopped paying attention) frequently deleted, seemingly at random and without any notice or hope of appeal, forcing the group members to reconstitute themselves on other services or in new, temporary, Yahoo groups. If Yahoo buys Tumblr, the adult Tumblr ecosystem is in for a rough ride.
According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday night to decide whether to approve a $1.1 billion all-cash offer for New York-based blogging site Tumblr.
Update, via Violet Blue’s sex news:
If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn? (Businessweek)
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=9887
I’m hoping this story will have some legs. Violet Blue’s picking it up is encouraging.
I’m seeing a lot of little stories in the business press about the possible sale, and most of them have at least a line or two about the “porn problem” that comes with Tumblr. But none of the business reports seems to have comprehended or mentioned that Tumblr is already taking steps to hide the porn. It feels weird to have scooped the business mags on an important detail of an notable financial story.
Next steps are either (1) business press never notices this detail or (2) they notice it when Google shows them my blog post and then they start reporting it like they discovered it themselves. The one outcome I’m sure we won’t see is ErosBlog getting a hat tip in Business Insider.
Even though only an elite few of any given population could read at the time, when we lost the library at Alexandria, we lost an incalculably valuable chunk of our history as human beings.
If every single “porn” poster on Tumblr hasn’t somehow sufficiently backed up his or her collection, and it is similarly lost, MILLIONS of hard hours of work documenting our erotic journey, will simply evaporate. Yeah, I know it’ll nearly all eventually come back in bits and pieces, but NEVER in the exact same way it was collected in these the historical early days of the internet.
Even cable TV’s History Channel (H2) is currently running a program titled “How Sex Changed the World”, which is extremely enlightening and important. Some people are just too ignorant to realize the enormous value of this “porn” stuff. People need to get over this squeamishness about sex, and it’s glorious variations. It’s doing us far more harm than good to try to push it aside.