Читать книгу Tumblr - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 11

In an attempt to make tumblr more palatable for advertisers, Verizon enhanced its filtering of sexual content in 2017, and by December of the next year it announced a plan to ban all sexual content from the platform (see Chapters 1 and 6). This generated, next to public uproar, a drastic drop (estimated at 30 percent in the first three months) in user engagement and traffic (Sung 2019), and spawned a crop of tumblr clones targeted at those with interest in sexually explicit content. By May 2019, news surfaced that Verizon was looking to offload tumblr. Pornhub expressed interest, but in August, Verizon announced a sale of the platform and the company to Automattic, the owner of the blogging platform WordPress. The price tag was less than US$3 million, a phenomenal drop from the US$1.1 billion that Yahoo! had bought it for. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg echoed the popular sentiment of tumblr being something beautiful but ruined by Yahoo!, and had a hopeful vision that under Automattic the “magic” and “frisson” that tumblr once brought to blogging could be reinvigorated. “I would love for tumblr to become a social alternative,” Mullenweg said, while arguing that tumblr had always brought substance to social discourse and possessed a certain friendliness and supportiveness that other platforms lacked (Patel 2019).