The IT Nerd

The news is breaking that Automatic, who are the people behind WordPress, have picked up Tumblr. What’s is mind blowing is that when it was sold to Yahoo, it was sold for $1.1 billion. Guess how much Automatic paid for Tumblr?

Give up? Here’s the answer from Dan Primack who broke the story on Axios:

3/ Story updated: Price less than $3 million.

— Dan Primack (@danprimack) August 12, 2019

Wow. I guess that Verizon who paid all that cash really wanted to dump Tumblr. I guess the traffic drop on Tumblr made it worth it to Verizon to basically give it away. But before you think that this means that porn is back on Tumblr, think again. According to The Wall Street Journal, the platform’s ban on adult content will remain in place.

You might recall that Verizon owned Tumblr banned porn, and then visits to Tumblr fell off a cliff as a result. That has to be costing Verizon money. Which is why according to Buzzfeed Pornhub the porn video site is “Extremely Interested” in acquiring Tumblr:

Pornhub Vice President Corey Price said in an email to BuzzFeed News that the porn-streaming giant is extremely interested in buying Tumblr, the once uniquely horny hub for young women and queer people that banned adult content last December to the disappointment of many of its users.

Price said that restoring Tumblr’s NSFW edge would be central to their acquisition of it, were it to actually happen.

Tumblr owner Verizon is reportedly currently seeking a buyer for the blogging platform, which according to the Wall Street Journal has struggled to meet revenue targets.

Well, this is an interesting development. I am going to go out on a limb to say that this likely if Tumblr is burning through cash at a high rate. I guess that Verizon has figured out that porn pays the hard way.

You might recall that Tumblr banned porn from its platform, which of course set off a wave of anger across the Interwebs. Well, to nobody’s surprise, that ban has had a negative effect on Tumblr. If you check out these numbers from SimilarWeb, you’ll see that from December to now, there’s a decline in traffic to the site from 521 million views in December 2018 to 437 million in January, and 369 million in February. That’s not good for Verizon who dropped a lot of cash to get Tumblr which was part of Yahoo at the time. That despite the deal becoming a bit of a mess because of Yahoo and the various issues that they had at the time.

I wonder if Verizon thinks it’s all worth it now as clearly Tumblr is being abandoned faster than people leaving a sinking ship?

It seems that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only ones that have problems with Russian linked accounts that may be up to no good. According to a reader (thanks for the tip by the way) of this blog, it seems that Tumblr is sending out emails to users that inform them that they have come in contact with Russian linked accounts and that those accounts are being deleted. Here’s the first part of the message:

As part of our commitment to transparency, we want you to know that we uncovered and terminated 84 accounts linked to Internet Research Agency or IRA (a group closely tied to the the Russian government) posing as members of the Tumblr community.

The IRA engages in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. When we uncovered these accounts, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts.

While investigating their activity on Tumblr, we discovered that you either followed one of these accounts linked to the IRA, or liked or reblogged one of their posts:

The next part of the message details the Tumblr accounts that were linked with the users accounts, followed by this:

You aren’t in trouble, and don’t need to take any action if you don’t want to. We deleted the accounts but decided to leave up any reblog chains so that you can curate your own Tumblr to reflect your own personal views and perspectives.

Democracy requires transparency and an informed electorate and we take our disclosure responsibility very seriously. We’ll be aggressively watching for disinformation campaigns in the future, take the appropriate action, and make sure you know about it.

— Tumblr

This is an interesting tactic on the part of Tumblr as I am pretty sure that they don’t want to be the next protest hashtag that trends because they didn’t do anything to stop Russian linked accounts. I do wonder how effective it will be though. But I suppose that they have to start somewhere. I also wonder how leaving up any content that has been reblogged helps this situation. I guess Tumblr doesn’t want to be seen as censors. But if it were me I would zap it all so that these Russians don’t continue to benefit from the posts in question. In any case, This is an interesting development as I must admit that I didn’t see this coming.