{"id":15028,"date":"2019-05-03T04:17:49","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T04:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/why-you-dont-want-tumblr-sold-to-exploitative-pornhub.html"},"modified":"2019-05-03T04:17:49","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T04:17:49","slug":"why-you-dont-want-tumblr-sold-to-exploitative-pornhub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/why-you-dont-want-tumblr-sold-to-exploitative-pornhub.html","title":{"rendered":"Why you don\u2019t want Tumblr sold to exploitative Pornhub"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tumblr has been squandered ever since it was bought for $1.1 billion in 2013 by Yahoo, now part of Verizon Media Group. Without proper strategy or talent, the blogging tool and early meme-sharing network fell into decline while Medium and Instagram soared. Yahoo wrote down Tumblr\u2019s value by $230 million in 2016. Then last year, Verizon evicted Tumblr\u2019s huge and loyal base of porn bloggers, leaving no viable platform for independent adult content creators and curators.<\/p>\n

Now the Wall Street Journal<\/a> reports that TechCrunch parent company Verizon is considering selling Tumblr.<\/p>\n

\"\"Many immediately hoped it\u2019d change hands to an owner who\u2019d embrace pornography, such as social media darling Pornhub. BuzzFeed <\/a>quickly reported that Pornhub VP Corey Price told it \u201cWe\u2019re extremely interested in acquiring the platform and are very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content.\u201d<\/p>\n

But given Pornhub <\/a> parent company MindGeek\u2019s record of exploitation <\/a>of adult performers, that could be a disastrous proceeding for the world of kink.<\/p>\n

Outside of Pornhub, MindGeek owns many of the top porn streaming sites like YouPorn, RedTube, and GayTube. Widespread piracy<\/a> of porn films by those sites has made it tough for performers to earn a living. Many smaller studios or performers don\u2019t have the legal or financial resources to file constant copyright infringement takedown notices, and MindGeek\u2019s sites have been accused of allow re-uploads of videos days after taking them down.<\/p>\n

The truly insidious part is that MindGeek has also bought up a bunch of the top porn production studios including Brazzers, Babes.com, and Digital Playground. MindGeek has been accused of allowing those studios\u2019 films to be pirated by its own streaming sites<\/a>. That lets MindGeek earn and keep streaming ad revenue without giving performers a proper cut.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The result has been a massive decline in the wages<\/a> of porn performers and the number of films being made. This is turn pushes performers into more rough and extreme porn genres they\u2019re not comfortable with, or into other sex work like prostitution that can be dangerous. We reached out to Verizon Media Group which told us \u201cwe don\u2019t comment on rumors\u201d, and we\u2019re awaiting comment on piracy issues from MindGeek.<\/p>\n

If Pornhub and MindGeek succeed in acquiring Tumblr to strengthen their near monopoly, they could end up exploiting porn bloggers and the performers they post about too. You could imagine the photos and GIFs in diverse porn genres that populated Tumblr getting scraped and shared across MindGeek\u2019s network of sites beyond the bloggers\u2019 or performers\u2019 control. Or Tumblr\u2019s porn blogs could be used to funnel traffic towards MindGeek\u2019s crooked streaming sites, exacerbating the piracy problem. A more optimistic view is would be that Pornhub\u2019s newer features that let performers set up their own paywalls could help Tumblr curators earn money for themselves\u2026and MindGeek. If Pornhub managed to turn Tumblr around, it would deal a stern lesson to platforms that were quick to ban adult content.<\/p>\n

Since many of the puritanical US government\u2019s elected officials likely see porn performers as godless heathens undeserving of protection, they\u2019re unlikely to try to safeguard the profession with anti-trust or fair payout regulation. The SESTA-FOSTA law that went into effect last year intending to stop sex trafficking ended up pushing sites like Tumblr, Facebook, and Patreon towards tougher crack downs on porn, nudity, or even innocent discussions about sex within support communities for LGTBQ people and other underprivileged minorities.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, MindGeek\u2019s massive footprint means it might be willing to bid the highest price for Tumblr. If Verizon does sell Tumblr, it should seek a buyer with an upstanding record for how it treats creators. But Verizon could also modernize Tumblr to emphasize what\u2019s differentiated about it in today\u2019s tech landscape versus when it was founded in 2007. Obviously, it could reopen to porn. But there are also family friendly opportunities.<\/p>\n

Tumblr was one of the first big meme-sharing communities, even spawning its own format of screenshots of progressively crazier replies to a short text post. Yet in 2019, the top meme networks like Instagram, Reddit, and Imgur aren\u2019t actually built for distributing massive \u2018dumps\u2019 of memes. They don\u2019t understand which you\u2019ve already seen to prevent showing re-runs, or how remixes of an original meme all relate and should be linked. Tumblr could build meme-specific features that give users more curational power than Reddit and Imgur, but more freedom of expression under less pressure than Instagram.<\/p>\n

\"\"Tumblr could also be repurposed into a \u201cyour Internet homepage\u201d platform. Most social networks are so desperate to keep users on their apps that they restrict or deemphasize the ability to promote your other web presences. They also often focus on a narrow set of content types like photos and videos on Instagram. This leaves users who don\u2019t have their own dedicated websites without a central hub where they can freely express their identity and link to profiles elsewhere. This is a huge opportunity for Tumblr, which has already established itself an open-ended self-expression platform open to a variety of content formats.<\/p>\n

AOL, which was combined with Yahoo to form the Verizon Media Group, previously owned a web profile platform called About.me, but sold it back to its creator Tony Conrad in 2013. Tumblr could assume much of About.me\u2019s functionality as a directory of someone\u2019s presences on other apps, and add that to its blogging platform. Instead of being locked into Instagram and Pinterest\u2019s grids and standardized designs, Tumblr could let people create a homepage collage representing their prismatic identities.<\/p>\n

Tumblr\u2019s already been waning in popularity for years, so Verizon might not have a lot to lose by giving Tumblr a year to execute on this strategy before selling it for surely much less than it bought it for in 2013. Tumblr\u2019s remaining users deserve better than the platform fading into nothing or being sold to the unscrupulous.<\/p>\n

If any pornography industry professionals want to weigh in, please contact this article\u2019s author Josh Constine via phone\/text or Signal encrypted messenger at (585)750-5674 or joshc \u2018at\u2019 techcrunch dot com.<\/em><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/gp_BLDej5EU\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tumblr has been squandered ever since it was bought for $1.1 billion in 2013 by Yahoo, now part of Verizon Media Group. Without proper strategy or talent, the blogging tool <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-15028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t