NEW YORK CITY, May 24, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The online media conglomerate Yahoo! Inc. has promised not to remove pornographic material from the youth-oriented blogging platform Tumblr, which it recently purchased for $1.1 billion.
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has promised in a blog post that her company will “not screw it up” for Tumblr’s 216 million monthly visitors.
During a conference call for stockholders discussing the buyout, one investor asked Mayer how the company plans to protect advertisers from the parts of Tumblr that are “not as brand safe as the rest of Yahoo,” namely, its large number of pornographic image-based blogs.
Mayer said that despite Yahoo!’s family-friendly reputation, the company plans to “let Tumblr be Tumblr” and will not clean the blogging site of obscenity.
Tumblr’s community guidelines are notoriously lenient about pornography.
The site is especially known for its tightly-knit communities of users who share unusual fetishes, such as adult bedwetting and zoophilia.
It also has a large number of “thinspiration” pages run by young women with eating disorders, and “cutting” pages for those who engage in self-harm.
Pornography is so common on the site that in January, after many complaints from parents, Tumblr finally added age restrictions to the site and its mobile app.
The age limit to use the mobile app is 17, but to use the full version, users only need to be 13.
Tumblr asks only that users mark X-rated content with the tag “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work) and avoid using the site’s proprietary video hosting software to upload porn, because “hosting that stuff is f—ing expensive.”
Prior to the announcement, Tumblr users themselves were up-in-arms (warning: obscene language) about the acquisition, concerned that the corporate behemoth will clean house in deference to the advertisers from whom it hopes to recoup its $1.1 billion investment.
Mayer said that Yahoo! will carefully target ads to avoid showcasing brands on X-rated or offensive pages but otherwise allow the site to continue as it is.
“I think the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr — even though it may not be as brand safe as what’s on our site – is what’s really exciting and allows us to reach even more users,” Mayer told investors. “One of the ways to start measuring our growth story here is around traffic and users, and this obviously produces a lot of that. In terms of how to address advertisers’ concerns around brand safety, we need to have good tools for targeting.”
The purchase made 26-year-old David Karp a billionaire. The acquisition was by far the largest purchase Yahoo! has ever made, and seems aimed toward broadening the 19-year-old company’s user base to a younger demographic.