Current Events > "We're getting rid of porn because it scares advertisers"

(+) Yeah! (+)

*tons of users leave*

"Huh, now we have no-one to advertise to. Guess we didn't really think this through, did we?"

Is there any evidence that Tumblr actually lost money by banning porn?

BurmesePenguin posted...

Is there any evidence that Tumblr actually lost money by banning porn?

Do we need evidence besides how it turned into a desert?

"We can certainly recoup our losses by putting our website behind a subscription model."

*more users leave*

"We'll just increase the fee for those who subscribed."

*website dies*

CARRRNE_ASADA posted...

Do we need evidence besides how it turned into a desert?

I don't know anything about that and I would prefer numbers to silly gamefaqs users' silly personal accounts.

BurmesePenguin posted...

Is there any evidence that Tumblr actually lost money by banning porn?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-traffic-plummets-after-porn-ban

Traffic to Tumblr has fallen by close to 30 percent since December, when the blogging platform banned adult content, according to market intelligence firm SimilarWeb.

edit:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-porn-ban-nsfw-flagged-reactions-fandom-art-erotica-communities-2019-8

In the year since the "porn ban," traffic to Tumblr and app downloads have dropped drastically. To top it all off, Tumblr was bought this year for less than $3 million, compared with its once-$1.1 billion price tag.

BurmesePenguin posted...

Is there any evidence that Tumblr actually lost money by banning porn?

It was 1.1 billion dollars when Verizon bought it and 3 million dollars when they sold it.

BurmesePenguin posted...

I don't know anything about that and I would prefer numbers to silly gamefaqs users' silly personal accounts.

Well you are never going to get more than that, because only Tumblr can answer your question and it is certainly not in their interest to do so.

Factually, we know that Tumblr traffic and the brand in general took a massive fall. But less traffic also means less expenses, so the question is did less expenses and fewer ad buys, but at a higher rate resolve to more profits than higher expenses and more ad buys at a lower rate.
But honestly almost all websites are nothing but a money pit even with ad revenue, which is why they resort to selling all the personal information they can manage to scrape from people.

2012-2013 was peak Tumblr in every way, not just porn. That being said, the porn community with 30,000 videos I'm subscribed to is owed thanks to me discovering them through Tumblr so.

Imgur has been terrible for awhile, they were already dying

BurmesePenguin posted...

Is there any evidence that Tumblr actually lost money by banning porn?

It sold a few years later for roughly 1/300th of its initial value.

Probably don't need more evidence of how bad a move it is after looking at the subscription-based content creator site and how fast they backpedaled after announcing a similar move

sauceje posted...

Probably don't need more evidence of how bad a move it is after looking at the subscription-based content creator site and how fast they backpedaled after announcing a similar move

If you meant Patreon they followed through with it but people misunderstood what they were asking. They didn't ban porn entirely, they only banned content that was functionally identical to OF. They still support pornographic art / games / etc.

I meant OF