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posted by martyb on Friday August 16 2019, @08:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the Rule-34 dept.

Reports had been coming out over the past few days about the likely sale of microblogging site Tumblr by Verizon to Automattic, owner of Wordpress. Now, the Guardian reports that the sale price is said to be just under $3 million, well short of the $1.1 billion price that Yahoo (who was subsequently acquired by Verizon) paid for it in 2013.

Tumblr is the second major Yahoo property to be spun-off by Verizon. The photo-sharing site Flickr was unloaded in April 2018 to photo-sharing site SmugMug. Unlike Flickr, Tumblr managed to maintain the bulk of its userbase through most of the years of its Yahoo ownership, thanks to the strength of its home-grown community, which survived in the face of competition from Facebook and Twitter.

That community took a hit in December 2018, however, when Verizon announced a plan to clean up the site by banning all adult content. The immediate cause of the decision was a temporary ban from Apple's App Store for the Tumblr app, after child pornography was discovered on the social network. But Tumblr's chief executive, D'Onofrio, said that in the longer term, "it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves".

Tumblr users disagreed, arguing that the site's broadly permissive attitude was key to its unique community.

Rumors are that the sale was conditional upon the site remaining porn-free. On that basis, is $3m too much for it?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:48PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:48PM (#881054)

    1. Buy Playboy
    2. Declare a nudity ban
    3. Don't profit
     

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:25PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:25PM (#881126)

    4. ???

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 16 2019, @03:39PM (5 children)

      by Freeman (732) on Friday August 16 2019, @03:39PM (#881132) Journal

      4. Eventually go out of business, because I mean who buys the line: "I was just reading it for the stories"

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @04:24PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @04:24PM (#881153)

        Who bought Playboy for the pics that isn't in their 50s out older? Porn had been so available the last several decades that it's just not that big of a draw.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @12:57PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @12:57PM (#881505)

          Sure when I was 18. The articles were interesting. The pictures more so.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @09:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @09:25PM (#881281)

        4. Eventually go out of business, because I mean who buys the line: "I was just reading it for the stories"

        Playboy actually had a very decent article on the Saturn EV1, actually used that as a formal cited source in a college paper :)

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 17 2019, @01:51AM (1 child)

        by driverless (4770) on Saturday August 17 2019, @01:51AM (#881390)

        That could be valid for Penthouse, at least older issues. For example they had coverage of political issues in the 1970s that no-one else was willing to touch. Friend of mine (legitimately) referenced Penthouse in his PhD dissertation, because that was the only publication brave enough to cover the area he was writing on.

        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday August 19 2019, @02:03PM

          by Freeman (732) on Monday August 19 2019, @02:03PM (#882121) Journal

          That's more of an exception that proves the rule.

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday August 16 2019, @06:03PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 16 2019, @06:03PM (#881206) Journal

      4. GOSUB 2

      (for that one guy who is going to complain, has previously complained, about not using GOTO, I can just say that my longtime experience with Java and senior developer position inform me that memory and the stack of each thread are unlimited. Just as clean tap water is unlimited. And cheap fossil fuels. And internet bandwidth. And even if in some alternate reality they weren't unlimited, the GC is a magic incantation that waves away all concerns about out of memory or stack overflows. Java abstracts everything away so it is unnecessary to have any inkling of how things actually work underneath that abstraction. Everything is the happy case all the time. The VM can fool all the people all the time. What could go wrong.)

      --
      To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.