“Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It’s where your interests connect you with your people.” This is the description that the microblogging platform gives itself but things have changed slightly over the past few months, not just with how Tumblr users express themselves but also with the number of visitors the platform gets.

In December 2018, the platform hit 521 million views in that month alone, this was before the company drastically decided to ban sexual content from its platform – a genre that Tumblr had become famous for or as The Next Web puts it, this is where people “bonded over a shared love of kink”.

At the time, the company updated its policy to highlight, “adult content will not be allowed on Tumblr, regardless of how old you are.” The content includes “photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”

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No More “Female-presenting nipples”

Adult Content on Tumblr | Image Courtesy

This decision to axe adult content from the platform was not received well by the users who had turned the platform into their personal sex log, where people shared their sexual experiences and fantasies, especially women.

However, this ban did not come out of the blue, it followed a temporary ban from Apple’s App Store after child pornography content was discovered on Tumblr. Instead of putting in stringent measures to clean up the site from child porn, Tumblr decided to do the unthinkable and beat its own meat.

This drastic decision has cost the platform over 80 million views within 30 days of the ban implementation. As per The Next Web, which reports data from SimilarWeb, (we know it’s not exactly the most accurate website statistics service), Tumblr had 437 million views in January 2019, which is an 84 million difference between that and the previous month, a big price to pay to keep things “clean”.

It is unlikely that Tumblr will reverse their rule against adult content but if the platform is to survive past this walk-out, they will need to figure out a way to keep their visitors coming.