Based on my experience with Tumblr, Andrea Ayres-Deets hit the nail on the head: “Tumblr is about four things: animal pics, GIFS, LOLs, and amateur porn.”
So what will Yahoo’s recent $1.1 billion acquisition of the microblogging platform mean for all those naughty gifs? A recent Tweet gives a foreboding hint:
But why would Yahoo care about cleaning up Tumblr?
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos sat down with Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer and Tumblr’s CEO David Karp to talk about that and more. In the interview, Mayer claimed that there isn’t actually that much porn on Tumblr. Hmm. Not too long ago four of the top 10 Tumblr subdomains were porn.
One of the other challenges you are going to be facing is that a fair amount of content on Tumblr is adult content. Is it something you are comfortable with?
Mayer: It’s actually a mistaken assumption. It actually turns out that Tumblr relative to many of its peer sites has a low amount of adult content.
The idea is that we do want the community to have tools. Tumblr has originated the phrase “Not Suitable for Work,” (NSFW) so we want people to be able to tag so people who are looking for that type of thing can find it and those who don’t don’t and don’t find it by accident.
How do you do that?
Karp: Community flagging, machine learning. The end goal is that you draw a circle around that content and you give users a switch to turn it on and off. So if you don’t want to bump into it you don’t.
Oh Mayer. Please keep in mind that Google gave up that game long ago. The search giant found keeping porn from people who don’t want it and serving it to those who do so hard that they’ve pretty much given up on people who search for porn, and now savvy searchers are heading to Bing for their naughtier needs.
Why is porn so hard to “draw a circle around” and why is Google so intent on doing so that it’s abandoned its porn searchers? The answer to both questions is, in a word, advertisers.
Eyeballs are big bucks for savvy porn creators, so they’re intent on getting all the eyes they can, even those not looking for porn. But search engines and social media sites constantly try to weed out porn sites, putting the two in a constant battle. This ongoing fight has led Google to, for example, force SafeSearch for all image searches, so the results of even clearly NSFW searches like “boobs” were SFW. In its early years, Google famously blocked a ton of baby pictures when it banned all photos that were predominantly flesh toned in its effort to weed out porn. And many, many people have been infuriated by Facebook’s zealous crackdowns of nudity on the site.
So why do search engines and social media sites want to weed out the porn? To get a sense, one investor’s wording when describing Tumblr porn is instructive. The question was, what will Yahoo do with content that is “not as brand safe as the rest of Yahoo.” In plain English, porn is unsafe for mainstream advertisers (“brands”) because “paying for” porn by advertising alongside it tends to upset a small-but-angry portion of consumers.
All this means that if Yahoo wants to, for example, sell ads on the Tumblr dashboard, it will either need to get better than anyone else at making sure ads never pop up alongside porn, or find advertisers who don’t mind if they do.
Considering everyone else’s luck with both, I’d recommend all the porn Tumblrs to join the tens of thousands of sites who just moved their sites to WordPress.
“Tumblr has originated the phrase “Not Suitable for Work,” (NSFW)”
Um, no.
Sounds more like a Reddit thing. And I thought it was “safe.”
This is the first time I’ve heard it as Suitable instead of safe