If Yahoo does acquire Tumblr, it'll get more than just a social network with a dedicated 18 to 24-year-old audience to sell advertisements to. It'll also get porn for its alleged $1.1 billion offering.
A lot of porn. Porn ranging from the typical to the borderline illegal.
Tumblr has a very strong, very prolific, pornography audience. So much so that the microblogging site's starting success has been attributed to its pornographic offerings. While it has largely diversified its audience, it still contains a good deal of pornographic material.
Tumblr doesn't discourage the production of porn on its site, and, in fact, has language in its terms of service which expressly allows it –– so long as the content is tagged #NSFW and isn't bandwidth-heavy videos (though users are allowed to embed them).
But it's not a free-for-all. Tumblr expressly prohibits sexually suggestive depictions of minors, cutting, pro-anorexia blogs and a variety of other self-harm topics along with anything that promotes such activities. But just because it's prohibited in the company's terms of service doesn't mean such material won't pop up on its service.
That posses a massive problem for Yahoo, or whoever may acquire Tumblr, and its advertisers. Ad agencies –– outside of the adult entertainment industry –– tend to dislike their expensive ads being placed alongside sexually explicit images.
But then again, porn may not be an issue. As AllthingsD's Peter Kafka points out, Tumblr can work two ways for advertisers: a visitor can simply check out a Tumblr blog, thereby being counted as a user presented with ads, or, Tumblr can simply continue doing what it's currently doing with its dashboard - Tumbr's equivalent of a news feed - and place targeted ads right in front of its core users on one of the most trafficked areas on the site.
And ridding the site of its porn may not be an option. If Yahoo, or another company interested in Tumblr, were to purchase Tumblr and cull all of the adult material, it may turn off the site's regular users as being too aggressive a push to control the website's content.
"But considering that Yahoo is ostensibly interested in Tumblr for the advertising, it's hard to see the environment getting any friendlier for pornographers on the network," Joshua Brustein writes for Bloomberg Businessweek. "On the other hand, Yahoo may have to tread carefully with suggestive content. There are reasons why Tumblr is popular with young people. Prudishness is not high on that list."
