Matt Mullenweg wrote WordPress. (It powers this website alongside an absurd number of other websites to the estimated tune of 40% of the entire internet.) The software is free to use, but, in order to make money, he founded Automattic as a consulting group to help with… well, WordPress, among other things.
Tumblr was founded in 2007, right as the first iPhone was bringing the internet to your hands. WordPress was almost five years old by then, and the two platforms grew up alongside each other, both gaining significant market share as browsing the internet moved from “reading news at a physical computer” to “doomscrolling social sites standing in a line somewhere.”
WordPress never stopped its ascent, as evidenced by its 2021 market share noted above. Tumblr was also on the rise, walking alongside heavyweights like Reddit, and one of the major contributors to Tumblr’s rise as a unique, irreverent, and thriving website community was its safe-haven for adult-related content.
But in 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr, which, in 2017, was inherited by Verizon after its acquisition of Yahoo. So, naturally, in 2018, Verizon subsequently banned all “adult content,” a purposefully vague term that torpedoed Tumblr’s numbers.
If I were to attempt the impossible task of distilling the importance of adult content to Tumblr, I would do it with this quote from Vice:
Tumblr’s decision to effectively ban adult content has led to the erasure of stories, history, and communities of often marginalized people who made homes on Tumblr’s platform over the years. Archiving is a way to preserve that history.
“Archivists Say Tumblr IP Banned Them For Trying to Preserve Adult Content”
Vice
It was clear the new owners wanted nothing to do with it. It was more a thorn in their side than a cornerstone of the future for the communications company, which, after typing that out, feels incredibly inadequate. But, as the leader of a group that has spent his life creating online communities, Mullenweg spearheaded Automattic to step in, which bought the property in 2019 for a rumoured less-than-2% of Yahoo’s purchase price. It brought a small part of the internet full circle, and many had high hopes its new owners would reverse course on the porn ban.
I get the feeling Mullenweg wanted to, but it’s a near impossibility.
I’m not writing this to litigate the politics of sex work and what the ban did to the thriving adult community. I do want to be on record as pro sex work, though, and I understand the incredibly difficult nuances of running a website that allows for user generated content at scale; it’s a literal impossibility to moderate every image to ensure it’s legal prior to its posting.
I’m writing this because I found it fascinating what a grip credit card companies have on the adult industry. They all refuse to legitimize it, Mullenweg notes this in his addressing of the porn ban, and it’s why I feel like he wants to do something about it but can’t. Actually, the only reason I wanted to write this entire post was to note his quote (from that linked post) on what it would take to truly run an adult business online in 2022:
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
“Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022”
Photo Matt
It’s a Puritan’s world, we’re just living in it.