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: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday August 16 2019, @09:21AM (11 children)
>buy car
>Throttle exhaust
>Sell car
Unsurprisingly, value dropped...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Friday August 16 2019, @01:38PM
I respect your effort in the proud tradition of SN Automobile Analogy and propose my own analogy:
Disclaimer: Googling "bang bus" is probably NSFW, and the plot of their videos is probably exactly what you're thinking.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:44PM (9 children)
1. buy porno site
2. declare a porn ban
3. sell site
...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:48PM (8 children)
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)
4. ???
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 16 2019, @03:39PM (5 children)
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)
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
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
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)
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
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
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.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday August 16 2019, @11:04AM (1 child)
Have a quote:
According to Business Insider [businessinsider.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 16 2019, @04:10PM
A further decline from $3 million to $9000 isn't as bad.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 16 2019, @11:30AM (3 children)
Porn is pretty much the first thing ever created in any new media. There's a reason for this. Ignore it at your own peril.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:48PM
https://soylentnews.org/hueg-porno-stash/ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday August 16 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)
Advertising is pretty much the last thing ever created in any new media. There is a reason for this. Ignore it at your own peril.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 16 2019, @07:30PM
Yeah yeah, I know we run too many ads. We've been meaning to cut back but those hookers and blow ain't cheap.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @11:35AM (1 child)
Anybody can make a photosharing site.
The only thing it had for a moment was popularity, which can be lost in an instant.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:53PM
Are there backups?
Asking for a friend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @11:43AM (2 children)
Who would have thought?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 16 2019, @06:09PM (1 child)
But . . . Family Values!
Depending on the type discipline of your preferred language, family values may be assignable to a variable of any type, or only to variables of a certain type that are compatible with that value. The variable (LHS) type may be more than one actual type for any given value. Especially in languages that allow you to create your own type algebras.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @01:01PM
They have Facebook, Twitter, Gmail for family values. Why screw up our fun?
(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, $.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 16 2019, @02:36PM
The value of having internal access to the databases for mining and reselling to tune recognition programs. So tell me again, did they get their value out of it? The world may never know....
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Revek on Friday August 16 2019, @04:44PM (1 child)
Someone just doesn't like porn or they don't want to see it profitable with it?
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @01:08PM
Even LGB[a-z]+ people like porn.. what's this guy's problem?
(Score: 4, Funny) by darkfeline on Friday August 16 2019, @08:09PM
You could say that Tumblr's share price came tumbling down.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Friday August 16 2019, @08:37PM
Not surprising.