That wasn’t a fork though. Qwikster was Netflix separating itself into two distinct businesses with very different offerings (movies by mail vs streaming).
Reminds me of Yik Yak a bit, the user count dropped like the Titanic because they attempted to pivot away from the main reason people were using the platform to begin with (in this case anonymous posts).
Not only did Tumblr activity collapse after the NSFW ban, but in the subjects I follow, activity seems to have settled on a niche of transwomen blogging about hobby or interest X, where their posts are mainly about being a transwoman interested in such things and not the hobby or interest itself. I understand that Tumblr has value for those transwomen wanting to express themselves and build community with others, but it has become a network relevant to only a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.
No, it’s just that intellectual subjects on Tumblr always attracted a certain share of neuroatypical people, and once the majority of users left Tumblr, only the neuroatypical remained.
Tumblr has plenty of discussion about hobbies, TV shows, anime, video games, etc. If you like a certain thing, tumblr is a great way to be exposed to people discussing it, making text jokes about it, making fanart about it, etc. That has been literally unaffected by the NSFW ban in the many fandoms I follow on it.
There are people like you describe, but it doesn't dominate the platform imo. It's easy enough to get a lot out of tumblr.
If that means all the weirdos with genitalia in their profile pics are gone and stop messaging me randomly (which is who actually left as far as I can tell), then good!
The remaining MAU might actually be the users they wanted to keep.
But as someone who never used tumblr for porn, I've seen no evidence that tumblr is dying for anyone other than aficionados of porn.
Did you even look at your link? Almost all the bar graphs suggest tumblr is doing great. If doing as good as Facebook is your bar for success, then you've just defined almost all businesses as failures. Those numbers beat owning a restaurant, and every startup I've ever worked at (which are all profitable).
So anyways, the tumblr that's basically the same as it was 10 years ago (unless you used it for porn), that's also still growing, is dying according to you, but not the numbers. Interesting. This is kind of like reading about your own death in the newspaper.
Who cares how it's doing financially? I'm not an investor. If the VCs who gave them money are never made whole, I do not care.
If their loss results in decades of free tumblr for me, all the better! I really doubt the site is gonna disappear tomorrow. And every indication so far is they aren't going to ruin it in the name of monetization.
You’re forgetting that those metrics are hugely important to tumblr because those metrics are hugely important to tumblr’s customers: advertisers. The reason they claim the policy change was necessary in the first place.
I don’t know what you mean by “business boy hat” - could this be a typo?
well they had the indirect effect of making the product better for their (unpaying) users.
When it comes to tumblr, I quite frankly don't give 2 shits about their advertisers. Why should I? Maybe the site will be shut down someday? You'd think that ship would've sailed.
I am talking from the perspective of a user. Those metrics have 0 impact on me as a user (outside of the company going under - or ruining itself in the name of more money.) There's no delusion here.
The users that remain on tumblr seem pretty happy about the effects of the nsfw ban. The people that left due to it weren't the good ones for the most part.
I don't think you understand how online businesses work. Social network companies like tumblr need advertiser dollars in order to pay for server and employee costs. Tumblr exists to generate revenue, user metrics mean revenue. If users aren't using the platform, advertisers stop paying as much and thus tumblr can't continue to exist.
Whether or not you like it now that porn is gone doesn't matter.
? why are you talking down to me? As if I don't know business 101? You sound like a wannabe VC.
Why do I need to align my values of good and bad with market forces? You literally cannot make an argument that your "objective" value system about business is the only True one.
I'd bet tumblr will continue to exist and I'd get to enjoy it for free (modulo ads) for at least another half decade if not more. And I bet throughout that time the company won't do much to monetize their users beyond what they already do. The userbase has long since proven it doesn't give tumblr money beyond a stray click. But it'll continue to plug along - "failing" the whole way.
There's as much or more tumblr activity for my dashboard & on my blog. I get way fewer porn spam bots following me now. And people generally seem to be happy with the website & are continuing to use it to talk about the stuff they like.
Why do this and not just create an OnlyHoldings with OnlyFans as one of the wholly owned companies, and divert some capital from that business into a new venture then cross-promote on the existing platform.
I personally would agree with this approach. It sounds like someone on their leadership team was never fundamentally or spiritually at peace with being a platform for pornography.
Yea, but it was a huge amount of their traffic [1] and they never have recovered [2]. Even during the pandemic, while people were spending more time online, tumblrs usage has been lackluster, while other sites like fb have had consistent growth [3].
So, to say porn might not have been what made it likeable might be true, but porn certainly was one of the big drivers of traffic.
i'm discussing the site as a product. it's a better product now, and that sentiment is pretty widespread by its engaged users. Sending the porn to other, more growth-obsessed platforms was worth it.
How long tumblr will last - i don't know. Its users are not very monetizable. But as a social media website, it is comically superior to twitter and facebook. And my argument is the exact things that cause you to say it is bad are why it is superior.
I disagree. If a social media website is a business and it killing its main attraction harms its business prospects , it’s products have not improved. How much a product is worth is a major factor into what makes a product better or worse. By removing porn and thus it’s traffic , Tumblr has become a third grade social media site to advertisers.
But it's a better product for the users. The social network being used to enable people to talk & share is very good and improved by the nsfw ban by many accounts.
Explain to me why anything you had to say there has to do with a user's experience? The amount of content for non-nsfw didn't take a hit.
You sound like an investor trying to profit from tumblr. Not a user trying to leverage it to have a good time.
If you have 7 users Monday, make a big change on Tuesday and now on Wednesday have 4 users, which then stays the same count for years. Is that really better for your community? To stay static and not grow, as every other social media company has been doing?
Tumblr is a great example of having the right end goal (making the community safer to advertise on, thus have more revenue), but doing it in a really dumb way. Instead of killing off their well established albeit NSFW userbase, they should have been incentivizing them to post more SFW content that could have been monetized.
Instead the perception of tumblr is they were the porn social media site that banned porn and became irrelevant.
> If you have 7 users Monday, make a big change on Tuesday and now on Wednesday have 4 users, which then stays the same count for years. Is that really better for your community?
Does this argument hold up for literally anything else advertisers might not like? For example (no moral equivalency implied), if you banned X (pick one: pedophiles, nazis, kkk, racists, snuff, animal abuse, warez) because advertisers perceived your website as having an X problem, are you sure you're not a little too intensely focused on the "line goes up"?
Does the reverse hold up? If tumblr tomorrow decided they would allow X content, and they estimated 30% traffic increase, would that be good? If course not, the pool of advertisers would shrink in quality and quantity.
> Companies such as Sticky’s Finger Joint, a restaurant chain specializing in chicken fingers, have joined OnlyFans as part of their marketing strategies.
I assume people aren’t paying a monthly subscription to follow their favorite chicken finger company. So is OnlyFans trying to pivot into the next big social media platform? Are they trying to compete with Cameo and Patreon or are they trying to compete with Facebook/Instagram and Twitter?
This could be great for their porn business. How many people don't subscribe to OnlyFans because it shows up on their bank statement and it means 'I pay people to make porn'? This could add the degree of plausible deniability needed (for banks, spouses, etc.) to make people much more comfortable.
If I were to guess it would be that to those on the inside it is obvious where the PPV porn numbers top out at in terms of near-future revenue and that these numbers are not sufficient to justify the valuation growth that they want to see. Profitable is nice, but if you want to build a unicorn you have to aim for bigger profits and lower risk than what the current OnlyFans model provides.
I really dislike this entire mentality so much. At what point did we go from a place where you have a diverse set of companies making good revenues and profits and serve their audiences well to this crappy model of everyone trying to be the next Instagram.
Adult content creators are probably going to get booted off at some point for 'ad-friendliness' despite the fact that they helped build most of it.
If they did this they will end up like tumblr: in the oblivion. They have the luck to be profitable, differently from tumblr. Them pivoting to non porn would be a choice, not a necessity like tumblr
There are plenty of such sites. You don't hear about them in the Web Dev/Startup bubble because they're just getting on with life and their business model, not open-sourcing the latest JavaScript framework du jour.
Sorry, people with mortgages and children don't quit jobs due to "signaling".
They only quit jobs when they've got the alternative lined up. And they change jobs because the compensation doesn't outweigh the crap.
When a big chunk of your company suddenly walks, that's either high crap or low compensation. And it's been ongoing because they've had time to plan their exit as a group.
If I were them I would spin off the adult stuff into a sub-brand. It can be the same technology, administration, ops, everything. Seems easier than strangling the goose that lays golden eggs.
But "the adult stuff" is their brand. The fact that you can use the service for anything is more of a sidenote. The question "do you have an onlyfans?" implies "adult stuff".
Pivoting away from the core reason you make money even if it's not the intended use case seems like a great way to cause the death of your company.