ESC

Banning Porn Killed Tumblr, Now Pornhub Wants to Buy It

Pornhub

Most social media websites are extremely sex-negative. It isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that it’s easier to get big brands to advertise if you don’t allow any pornography, so all the major social media websites, aside from Twitter, have fairly draconian rules about nudity.

Tumblr had been bucking the trend by allowing porn until they ran into trouble with Apple’s app store and the announced it was banning all explicit content effective December 17th. As absolutely everyone expected, this lead to a massive downturn in Tumblr’s userbase, and now parent company Verizon is looking to unload it after a 30% decline in web traffic.

An interested party has appeared, and its name is PornHub. This is probably no surprise because PornHub immediately made a play for Tumblr’s users when the ban on explicit content was announced.

Now PornHub’s Vice President has told BuzzFeed that his company is interested in buying Tumblr at the deep discount Verizon will surely be offering.

“Tumblr was a safe haven for those who wanted to explore and express their sexuality, adult entertainment aficionados included,” Price told BuzzFeed News. “We’ve long been dismayed that such measures were taken to eradicate erotic communities on the platform, leaving many individuals without an asylum through which they could comfortably peruse adult content.”

“There are obvious synergies between the two brands and value Pornhub could derive from Tumblr. We’re extremely interested in acquiring the platform and are very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content,” Price said.

One of the final forms of late capitalism is a porn company becoming a major player in general entertainment. At the moment, MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub, only owns adult websites, but this news says they’re looking to become a player in the world of things people watch with their hands not touching their genitals, too. Tumblr isn’t just “the porn social media network” after all; it hosts blogs from all sorts of people, including the head designer of Magic: The Gathering, a card game for children and adults who still like the things they liked as children.

This could actually be the first step to PornHub buying one of the major broadcast networks. My money is on Fox. To quote The Simpsons, “You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn’t even notice.”

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments