Would Verizon sell Tumblr to Pornhub???
Update: 8/30/2022, Obviously this did not happen. A company by the name of
Automattic now owns Tumblr. Automattic was founded in 2005 and also owns wordpress. Automattic raised US$846 million in six funding rounds. The last round of US$288 million was closed in February 2021. A subsequent private stock buyback valued the company at US$7.5 billion
Old, outdated article below.
I confess that I never jumped on the Tumblr hit parade as far as posting content there. I didn’t have anything against the platform and I visited the pages of other people there but I never decided, “hell yeah, I want to join that site.”
When the company’s CEO, Jeff D’Onofrio, announced in December that Tumblr was putting a ban on nudity and sexually-provocative content, many warned the sanitization would mark the end of the longstanding blog. The change in policy removed a lot of content that was bringing traffic. So obviously, the critics weren’t wrong. Tumblr has been been going down hill since the new policy came into effect. According to statistics published by SimilarWeb, views dropped from 521 million to 437 million between December of 2018 and January of 2019. Nearly another million visits fell off the following month.
But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how much traffic a site generates if it can’t figure out a way to monetize that traffic. I do not mean to sound overly mercenary but the point is to make money. Yahoo, after closing down its own Geocities, paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr in 2013 without much of a plan to create an advertising network for it or a profit sharing plan for its content creators.
The original success of google and youtube in part came from a desire to share the pie with content creators. Yes, of late they have muddied the waters and seem to have forgotten what made them google and youtube but originally, despite some very dark knight behavior even as they claimed, “do no evil,” they were pretty much forgiven by those who made money from them. Note, I never made money with google’s adsense. Damn it. 🙂 (I did make money with mainstream e-commerce through ads with them, however.) But if users can’t somehow profit from a network either through traffic they can monetize on their own or by the network sharing the pie, they tend to tire of the network. Rupert Murdoch pretty much destroyed myspace because he was sort of a greedy so and so who did not want to share the pie.
I think pornhub probably does understand how to turn tumblr around. They know how to monetize content although you might not realize that by reading some mainstream articles, and they do share the pie similar to the way that chaturbate does. Do they share enough of the pie? That is open for debate. LOL
Pornhub was founded by web developer Matt Keezer as a website within the company Interhub, and launched on May 25, 2007. In March 2010, the company was purchased by Fabian Thylmann as part of the Manwin conglomerate, now known as MindGeek. As part of MindGeek, Pornhub makes up one of several pornographic websites in the company’s “Pornhub NETWORK”, alongside YouPorn, RedTube and the like. Pornhub is the single largest adult tube website on the internet, hosting more videos than any similar site.
