Sam Biddle @ VALLEYWAG:
Since acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer began circling around Tumblr’s billion dollar GIF vortex, we wondered what Yahoo would do with the nasty stuff…
The brilliant, inelegant solution? Build a giant wall around the naked-sex-touching, and build it so tall that it’s hard to get around it: blogs with pornographic or even simply risqué stuff won’t show up on Tumblr tag pages (a popular way to navigate), or might be excluded from search engines.
This will also make it just as hard for you to find porn on Tumblr, which is a really big deal for millions of people who use Tumblr. The same millions of people who Yahoo! wanted so badly to buy access to, in order to advertise to them. But no one will want to advertise to them if they’re cruising for boobs. The problem here sounds confusing, but it’s not: Yahoo! bought Tumblr to be cool. Tumblr was cool, in part, because you could stumble upon boobs or some kind of freaky-ass GIF or whatever the hell. It was a free-thinking weirdo zone free from marketing prudes or content control charts. But once you start to build an internet red light district, the rest of town feels a lot less exciting.
The internet will never smile when you make it harder to masturbate.
READ THE FULL STORY HERE @ VALLEYWAG
also read the shutting down of Tumblr NSFW sites HERE
Cool
I think that we will see more of this coming to the internet. It seems we are going backwards and not forward.
This whole issue is part of the major shift in how people use the net. As Steve Jobs said, we’re in a post PC age. The web pioneer, Yahoo, was slow to the social media table and has acquired Flickr and now Tumblr to look more cool and hip to a younger demographic that lives on the net. In being so conservative, ad budgets chased Facebook, Twitter, etc and Yahoo’s advertising market share plunged from 15%+ to barely 8%. Now they just spent $1.1B on Tumblr that has never shown a profit and lost $25M last year. Investors are going to want to see profit on their investment in Yahoo. The big problem is as people rapidly switch away from PCs to mobile, where does the money come from? Mobil users have to pay for every GB of data and don’t want it used up by unsolicited ads. It’s a lot like the early days of cells when you were charged for every minute used either calling or receiving. That why to this day, supposedly, calls soliciting business are still banned on cells. So as PCs become the realm of business and personal computing becomes primarily ad free mobile, where’s the income stream to pay for content?
Tumblr, itself, has a host of problems as do similar sites. Many of its videos are powered by Flash, which Adobe abandoned on mobile last year, so most new mobile devices don’t support that making their content unviewable. They need to switch to HTML,etc to remain relevant…another big expense. Since mobile is the present and future, many companies aren’t even using Flash for new projects and even Adobe is moving on to new concepts. The biggest problem is legal. Yahoo has deep pockets and Tumblr largely exists on reblogged material. Virtually all of it violates copyright laws and makes them a prime target for litigation. The Berne Convention, the international copyright treaty, integrated into the WTO’s TRIP Agreement(’95) and updated for tech in 2002 by the WIPO Treaty virtually grants everyone on earth automatic copyright on anything you create and record in any matter. So unless you created it, you “stole” someone’s property by reposting it. Disclaimers don’t protect you in the eyes of the law. Look how studios pursue pirated discs, Gucci fake leather goods and Napster.
As to porn on Tumblr, it gets worse. Yahoo paid $1.1B for it. According to SimilarGroup, 11.4% of T’s top 200K sites are porn, 16.6% of T’s traffic is on porn sites and 23.4% of referrals to Tumblr come from external porn sites. So they invested a lot in content that advertisers want NO association with at all. Porn also has a Federal problem besides copyright infringement. Porn reg. 2257 is the certificate you see stating all persons are 18y/o+. None of the porn on T has these statements and Federal law makes no exception for either the originator OR anyone who reblogs such material. Even if all persons are 18+, not creating a certificate is a crime in itself. Though none of this is usually enforced, it can be and that depends on the ever changing political climate. You can see here that Yahoo’s lawyers are already getting twitchy and corraling the porn blogs and making the dashboard search for porn more unusable. This is their internal testing to judge viewer’s reaction. If the porn studios and/or the Feds get aggressive about content, Yahoo will conform.
I can see Yahoo getting more restrictive to attract ad revenue. They may eventually ban all reblogged porn and only allow user produced downloads that have a 2257 cert. to hold them harmless. Even that’s a lot of problems, trouble and expense to insure conformity for Yahoo. Will they see it as cost effective given the limited porn advertisers? They’ll eventually drop porn as it as it becomes a bigger liability in the lawyer’s eyes and make the whole site a lot more investor and advertising friendly at large over the porn niche with limited advertising potential.
Like TV and the growth of cable, you’ll see some limited free porn, but for good content, length, etc., it will become a subscription service like cable with various levels to be ad free zones.
It was fun, but the need for profit and a lack of advertisers willing to be associated with porn will make it disappear. Corporations exist to make money and today’s porn studios are struggling to stay alive with all the free porn available, so where would the industry get the money to advertise?
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