The social media platform Tumblr for most of its 12-year history had served as a haven for adult content, and users who were interested in exploring and expressing sexuality in all of its many permutations. But on December 3, 2018, Tumblr announced that porn—and in fact almost any display of nudity at all—would no longer be permitted on the site.
One year later, The Atlantic magazine has published an in-depth report on the state of Tumblr in the porn-free era, finding that the most popular meme on the site in 2019 involved Area 51, the Nevada Air Force base that, according to UFO lore, is where the United States governments experiments with alien technology and even keep the bodies of dead extraterrestrials on ice.
Also high on the list, according to The Atlantic’s findings, “Shaggy’s Power” memes—in which actor Matthew Lillard in character as “Shaggy” from the 2002 film adaptation of Scooby Doo is depicted as a godlike superhero.
As banal pop-culture content has come to dominate the platform, perhaps not surprisingly, Tumblr’s metrics have shown a declining rate of engagement with the site, according to The Atlantic. Tumblr’s traffic plunged about 30 percent in the first three months of the porn ban, as AVN.com reported, but though the site’s traffic recovered somewhat, the site’s average total of unique monthly visitors dropped 21.9 percent in 2019, compared to the previous year.
Daily activity on Tumblr’s Android app plunged 35 percent, according to the report, and the number of pages viewed by the average visitor to Tumblr during a single session dropped by 1.5, according to The Atlantic.
“My personal opinion about this whole story is that the numbers were very clear,” Luca Aiello, a researcher for Tumblr's former owner, Yahoo!, told The Atlantic. “People were very engaged with that type of content, and banning it would determine the fall of the community.”
The in-house research studies found that adult content on Tumblr was not confined to a virtual ghetto of porn fans isolated from the larger online community, but in fact was woven into the “fabric” of the site.
Of the 51 blogs followed by the average Tumblr user prior to the porn ban, between two and three were porn, and another two were “bridge” blogs, by users who reblogged porn content but were not part of the site’s porn-specific communities.
Though Tumblr continues, in August its corporate parent Verizon dumped it, taking a reported $1 billion loss, as AVN.com reported. Nonethless, new owners Automattic, Inc.—which also owns the online publishing platform WordPress—said that it had no plans to reinstate adult content to the social media site.
Photo By Pierre Andre Leclercq / Wikimedia Commons
