Yes, Tumblr has porn.
While it hasn't said how much of its site is pornographic material, it's enough that just about every knucklehead on the Internet has commented about Tumblr's many porn blogs.
Tumblr's porn content makes some people think that Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition was a waste because premium advertisers don't want to advertise against pornographic content.
On today's call with analysts, Marissa Mayer was asked about Tumblr's porn. Sort of. An analyst said, how will you deal with content that is not "brand-safe," which is code for porn.
Her answer: Targeting. She hopes to use good targeting to keep ads away from NSFW content.
A Tumblr backer explained it further to Peter Kafka at All Things D saying, "Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard follower model, opt-in."
In other words, just like all of the Internet has some porn, so too does Tumblr. There is plenty of advertising on the non-porn content of the web, and there will be advertising on Tumblr's non-porn content.
Also, Tumblr is an opt-in model. The user chooses who she is following, and what content is pumped into her Tumblr feed. Advertisers are advertising to users more than they are against content.
Yahoo will do its best to make sure ads don't follow porn, but if that were to happen it's more a statement on the user than it is on the content.
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
     |