A Quarter of Tumblr's Users Are There To Consume Porn, Data Scientists Estimate (vice.com) 119
On Monday, Tumblr announced that it will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th, alienating a large portion of the site's users who enjoy sharing and consuming NSFW content. Motherboard has surfaced a study conducted in 2017 by two Italian universities and Bell Labs, which found that roughly a quarter of Tumblr users were on the platform largely to consume pornography. From the report: This study was based on the behavior of 130 million users, about half of Tumblr's entire user base. Of that number, "adult content consumers are 22 percent of our sample," the study said. "At the time of the study, roughly 30 million active accounts were consuming adult content, either re-sharing it or following the accounts of those producers," Luca Aiello, one of the study's authors and now a senior research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs told Motherboard in an email. "I expect this audience to experience a noticeable drop in engagement: some of them will just churn out, many of them will likely reduce considerably the time spent on the platform."
Another 28 percent, or roughly 40 million users, encountered pornography unintentionally on Tumblr. That means they didn't seek out the porn, but they followed someone who pushed it into their feed. "The extent of this exposure is hard to estimate but it's probably not major," Aiello said. "Therefore, I believe some people in this segments would be happy to have a cleaner Tumblr feed but I don't expect a significant lift in their engagement, overall." Crucially, the study found that Tumblr's userbase was more female than many social networks ("we estimate that the average user age is 26 and 72 percent of the users are female," they wrote.) They found that these demographics held up between porn consumers and non porn consumers on the site, and that, in fact, young women between the ages of 20-25 were consuming porn on the site at a higher rate than young men. This means that Tumblr's crackdown will likely disproportionately affect women porn consumers.
Another 28 percent, or roughly 40 million users, encountered pornography unintentionally on Tumblr. That means they didn't seek out the porn, but they followed someone who pushed it into their feed. "The extent of this exposure is hard to estimate but it's probably not major," Aiello said. "Therefore, I believe some people in this segments would be happy to have a cleaner Tumblr feed but I don't expect a significant lift in their engagement, overall." Crucially, the study found that Tumblr's userbase was more female than many social networks ("we estimate that the average user age is 26 and 72 percent of the users are female," they wrote.) They found that these demographics held up between porn consumers and non porn consumers on the site, and that, in fact, young women between the ages of 20-25 were consuming porn on the site at a higher rate than young men. This means that Tumblr's crackdown will likely disproportionately affect women porn consumers.
"Tumblr users are jackoffs, study concludes" (Score:1)
File that under Shit : No
Re: "Tumblr users are jackoffs, study concludes" (Score:1)
Not really, they've invented a new language which has 57 gender neutral pronouns for each actual English pronoun.
Low estimate. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're being polite. They mean definitely no less than one quarter. The problem with a community built like Tumblr was the intent to blur the line between dialogue, art, and pornography. Mind you, even pornographers are opposed to this, because it also destroys their profit model. This new profit model still requires pornography to survive, but does so in a non-obvious way that appeals better to the subliminal.
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Re:Low estimate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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I get off on the naked women painted by cavemen
You like SKELETON porn? Man, I knew you were weird, but ... ;-)
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I don't quite get your motivation to get rid of porn.
The talent in porn is only exploited when A: it's illegal and they don't enjoy labor laws that give them leverage or B: there's so much talent around that their salaries crash.
In case of A the best thing is for the government and the people to not be prudish hypocrites.
Im case of B it's the same issie we're seeing everywhere else and I don't see many people wanting to make cubible work illegal because it's basically abuse.
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Legally difficult. Firstly because it can be hard to define porn, but mostly because it would be in violation of various binding international agreements.
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it would be in violation of various binding international agreements.
I don’t think the US will have any problem violating that international agreement
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Why don't we just remove copyright protection completely for porn
A good portion of this is simply Tumblr linking to existing pictures online.
then there will be no motivation to create more of it
Please cite an example for where this has worked for anything ever.
Don't know why people think I'm stupid when I suggest that...
The mind that created a problem can't not solve the problem. It's no surprise why you don't know why.
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Why don't we just remove copyright protection completely for porn, then there will be no motivation to create more of it ...
Who TF pays for porn? There is enough free stuff on the web that you could watch it 24/7 and never see the same stuff twice, although, of course, of course, I'm not speaking from experience.
Anyway there would still be porn, paid for or not; plenty of people will get a kick out of making it, and plenty of people are exhibitionists.
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And among those who followed someone who pushed adult content to their feed, they make the bold assumption that there would be an issue. Were they looking for a pair of fantastic breasts? No, they are too classy for that but if the perfect pair happens to flit across their feed I doubt they are upset about it.
sounds about right (Score:2, Funny)
tumblr = porn and anorexic chicks (who eventually turn to porn).
twitter = SJWs and people about to get fucked up by SJWs
hacker news = silicon valley douchebag 10x ninja rockstar brogrammers and indians
slashdot = intelligentsia and APK
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How deplorable.
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You forgot 4 Chan = slashdot after dark.
Twice as many watched the porn and didn't share (Score:3)
TFS says:
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roughly 30 million active accounts were consuming adult content, either re-sharing it or following the accounts of those producers
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Do YOU "share" the porn YOU watch, or just watch it?
I'd definitely bet less than half the people checking out porn shared it or "followed" the pornster. Just browse the porn, do your thing, and move on. (But please wash your hands).
So about half of their users or more are there for porn.
Boner (Score:2)
Ask your dick. Your dick knows when you're watching porn.
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Where are the porn, adult vs art line drawn at?
If you lose interest in the art shortly after beating off, then it was porn.
(Can't remember the origin of that quote)
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But what if every time you look at it assess that you jerk off again? THEN is it porn or a masterpiece?
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You mean some people only read it for the articles?
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Do YOU "share" the porn YOU watch, or just watch it?
Just watch it, but you don't understand the Tumblr system. Blogs there are not usually generic often covering very specific content and catering to every fetish known to man (or woman for that matter). That means when you browse and find something you like the easiest way to get updates on that content is to "follow" the poster of the content.
Resharing is irrelevant. "Following" is not. It's the difference between publishing and consuming content.
To draw a comparison to another social media site by looking
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(But please wash your hands).
Before or after? "Both" is not an option.
I never used tumblr regularly, sometimes I was sent there by some link or whatever, but went there after reading this article. Main page sucks, uses sndless scrolling an it's the same 10 or so entries repeating endlessly, with the occasional one-off entry in between. They say the adult content will be banned on December 17th. I searched for adult-related keywords (porn, hentai, adult, sex) - got no results. Looks like they started early with the banning.
Oh well... no
/Oblg. Pics or it didn't happen! =P (Score:2)
n/t
Well that means (Score:2)
They're usage is more family friendly than the majority us of internet usage.
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They're = their damn autocorrect
And the other 3/4th.... (Score:5, Insightful)
... are just too shy to admit it.
And perhaps more seriously though the study does specially states that the aforementioned 28% are there largely to browse porn. Which at least suggest while that remaining 72% are not there just for the porn we don't know how much of them still do use the site for it's adult content.
Ultimately I believe this is a sign of Tumblrs impending collapse, given that this entire situation stems from the fact that their administration was too technological inept to properly administer their site so they just decided to discard a large part of their user-base instead of just fixing the problem.
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... are just too shy to admit it.
And perhaps more seriously though the study does specially states that the aforementioned 28% are there largely to browse porn. Which at least suggest while that remaining 72% are not there just for the porn we don't know how much of them still do use the site for it's adult content.
Also quite critically this was a study based on the actual user accounts. Given that you don't need an account to browser tumblr and can just as easily fall down the linked rabbit hole from one blog to the next with and without an account it would stand to reason that the "traffic" associated with porn is far larger than what was covered in the study.
Combined with the fact that users typically are less likely to create an account purely for pornographic purposes I do wonder if the number of Tumblr's "reader
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months back, they started forcing users to have an account to view sites with adult content. Think they gained accounts, but lost over all users with that move. Or people shifted to sites that were not flagged as being adult content.
But this move, will surly be felt by tumblr. It's a move I think they where forced to.
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months back, they started forcing users to have an account to view sites with adult content.
You're right, I have an account too. I also have zero followers, am following no one and I do wonder where in the statistics I fit in. Bookmarks still work, you just need to be logged into a dummy account.
Errr my friend, not me. I wouldn't know anything about this at all. Move along now, nothing to see here. Oh look an elephant....
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It doesn't sound like there actually is a problem. The big mistake I see here is ever choosing to hear anything about tumbler and porn, if they hadn't done that they could maintain tumbler as a legitimate site and not a porn site. As it is all those ladies will go somewhere else they can pretend they aren't looking at porn.
Tublr hosts porn? (Score:2)
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and no recommendations here. Lame.
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I didnt know
You've been living under a rock?
Could be more (Score:1)
I am a dinosaur Yahoo user who still somewhat checks in for email via POP3. Saw lots of cool features like custom dynamic pages (remember when sites gave you a my.domain.com experience?), the acquisition of Geocities, the briefcases (which the private adult entertainment groups used to good extent but without worries about takedowns so often seen on modern Onedrive and other sites).
Tumblr stopped receiving me some years back when their parent company Yahoo started "cleaning it up" for the shareholders' sake
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Just use a fake name / email / pre paid credit card / voip phone number etc. no need to use your real name anywhere, I can't even remember my name.
What the (Score:4, Interesting)
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Putting liberal feminists and TERFs in a single tent is a bad idea, there will be blood.
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Remember just a couple years ago when all the actual women liked the word feminism and anyone who supported it but quickly distanced themselves from this or that wave feminism with all the extreme crazy men hating stuff?
I'm pretty sure those days are gone, now I don't meet any of those women anymore.
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Same goal, but for very different reasons.
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Has a free, distributed network ever worked for web sites?
The most successful seems to be Tor hidden services, but even they are mostly hosted centrally and the difficulty accessing them has prevented them from ever going mainstream.
You need to think of something better than distribution. It works for BitTorrent downloads/streaming but not for interactive, random access stuff like web sites where people have a tolerance of a fraction of a second for the page to load.
Ideally it has to work with a normal brow
Brings up a good point (Score:3)
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Seems like they could've simply flagged the porn-containing accounts to make them not visible from the app with a note of explanation about Apple's terms.
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Volume of use? (Score:3)
They talk about the number of users that follow porn versus the number who don't, but they don't really mention how much they consume.
If that 1/4 accounts for half (or more) of the page views, and the other 3/4 is just people who drop in occasionally to look at their cousin's Photoshop gallery, they're going to be losing a lot more than 25% of their "audience."
Walked Away from Their Business Model (Score:2)
Genital Recognition (Score:2)
Translation (Score:1)
1 in 4 data scientists were caught consuming porn, while the rest already finished.
What Matters to Tumblr is Advertising Revenue (Score:1)
What matters to Tumblr/Verizon is advertising revenue, not number of viewers--and the substantial majority of advertisers are not interested in being shown next to porn.
Tumblr: when IT blocks pornhub.com (Score:1)
Obligatory xkcd quote... (Score:3)
Decoder - Tumbler Decides to Die Slowly (Score:2)
Porn makes the Internet go round.
Just turn off the safe filter in your favorite search engine. Porn site routinely make the top 10 of global web-site traffic. They are all high definition streaming services that innovate at an amazing rate. Mid-Video Advertisement technologies were born here. Complex tracking user identification was born here. Advanced graphics cards and huge fiber bandwidth data routing was not needed to serve up static text site in the 90's. It was needed to serve up porn, that's
vs App? (Score:2)
Tumblr should have embraced the porn (Score:2)
Tumblr should have embraced it. Now they have destined themselves to be just another wannabe social media platform.
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As all things internet... (Score:1)
A clone will popup soon to take it's place with less restrictions eventually. As to how many, and what the names will be of said clones is the more prominent question.
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What's old is new. They've just brought back the flesh tone palette snooper. Porn hounds will just bring back inverted palettes, which make every porn model look like she's got a terrible disease (until fixed).
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They've just brought back the flesh tone palette snooper.
Good news for the full-body latex fetishists. Nary a skintone to be seen.
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