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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?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday August 16 2019, @01:56PM (3 children)
The different stories told for PR reasons are interesting to compare. There really isn't any unified story, every little identity to be propagandized to had its own completely isolated and separate propaganda stream telling many different stories about tumblr.
Most of the traffic by far was young men looking at young under-dressed attention-seeking women, as you'd guess.
Most of the legal trouble was the site was a major hub for CP and auditing / moderating it so as to allow naked 19 year old women while also ban 17 year old bikini wearing women at 100% effectiveness because the punishments are draconian was not financially viable. Its not like with human females you can visually count the rings like a tree, its quite normal for human females for a fraction of 15 year olds to be as physically developed as college cheerleaders and a fraction of 21 year olds to look like puberty still has not struck, so its a nightmare to implement previous century legal stuff. Or in summary, tumblr was full of CP and nobody knew from a process and technical perspective how to get rid of it all other than simply delete all the boobie pixs.
After the pr0n ban the PR message against it was exclusively focused on the impact on the "holier than thou" LGBTQITAZDCSGNK community, nobody cares about the vast majority of the site being THOTs and male beta orbiters, who frankly mostly went to reddit and chaturbate and tindr and other sites anyway. Kinda shows where straight people have dropped to in the progressive stack priority list, right to the bottom.
Most of the legacy media coverage when it was popular was the traditional scare stories for grandma, exactly like we got for D+D or video games or dancing or rock music in other generations, which was kinda funny. The death rate for tumblr use was somewhat lower than driving or alcohol or driving with alcohol, but legacy media gotta do scare stories, cause thats what they do, so... Once you see the pattern you know what to ignore and make fun of in legacy media.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 17 2019, @03:50AM (1 child)
Dead on target. Now I'm sad I already spent all my mod points. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @02:03PM
There's always tomorrow.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @05:08AM
I worked at VZ a few years ago because of an acquisition.
The major VP's all swung by. One put it bluntly. "We leave you alone for about a year. Then we integrate you. Then if you do not perform a year later we sell you off or close you". Guess where tumbler fell in that order. What you say makes sense. It happened about at the one year mark when they would basically show up and say 'you are verizion now deal with it'. They even had a slogan for it "we are verizion". I am sure they started digging and had a 'OMG' moment and 'fixed it'.
The acquisition I was part of had a material impact on the bottom line (which is no small trick with a company that big). They *STILL* cut half the staff. Just imagine what they will do to companies that do not make much money... Expect to see more of former yahoo to be spun out or just flat out shut down (no buyers). All they wanted out of that was the ad network, same reason they bought AOL. Everything else was extra and a distraction and probably not making much or at least not enough to be worth verizons time.
Oh they will say what they are about. Its not that. Its about one thing, $.