In December, the social media blogging platform Tumblr announced that it would ban porn and, for that matter, all “adult content,” starting on the 17th of that month, ending the platform’s run as the most sex-friendly of all the popular social media platforms.
But in the nearly two months since adult content began disappearing from Tumblr, internet entrepreneurs have been busy creating new platforms specifically to attract porn fans and users seeking specialized sexual content, as documented by a new report in the tech-business magazine Fast Company.
Perhaps the most successful of the new generation, according to Fast Company, is the social network newTumbl, whose very name is designed to evoke the lost Tumblr porn blogs. The site went online on New Year’s Eve and has accumulated about 40,000 blogs in the ensuing five weeks.
Fast Company also highlights MojoFire, a network that so far consists only of a placeholder page, and that describes itself as “the new micro-blogging platform for both users and communities to post their favorite media and creativity. We’re the online home for everyone to connect and share.” The FC report notes that the site is operated by “members of the BDSM community,” but does not intend to limit itself to content reflecting only BDSM tastes.
Another site, Pillowfort, “has been straining with the arrival of former Tumblr users, forcing it to limit new sign-ups,” according to the Fast Company report.
But according to FC, the site that has so far benefited most from the Tumblr porn ban is not a new site at all, but the decade-old Make Love Not Porn, which founder Cindy Gallop sees as a home for “social sex videos.”
What’s a “social sex video?”
According to Gallop, as quoted by FC, “Social sex videos on MakeLoveNotPorn are not about performing for the camera. They are about doing what you do on every other social platform, capturing what goes on in the real world, as it happens spontaneously in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, awkward, comical humanness.”
But though her site has been online for 10 years, Gallop says she saw a window of opportunity when Tumblr announced its porn ban, now planning to expand its content beyond user-produced “social” sex videos—with the help of $2 million in new capital from an anonymous investor.
“When Tumblr announced the ban, that’s when I said to my team, let’s move forward,” says Gallop.
Photo by Today Testing/Wikimedia Commons
