R.I.P. Tumblr!

Wow, here's a shocker! This month it was reported that blogging site Tumblr is in serious trouble, and was unloaded, er, I mean sold off by parent company Verizon. To Wordpress, no less— Tumblr's main competitor in the blogging arena!

So how did this unfortunate turn of events happen? In a word, porn. Or rather the lack of it.

Tumblr was launched back in 2007 by David Karp, when he was all of twenty years old. Karp wanted an alternative to traditional dull blogging sites like Wordpress.

The site quickly became a hit, and in 2010 Tumblr was getting over a 100 million hits per month (!). By 2011 that figure rose to an astonishing 3 billion!

For some reason Tumblr also became a haven for porn. You name the fetish, and odds are you could find it on the site. According to some reports, over half of Tumblr's visitors were using the site to gawk at pornography, which no doubt accounted for its popularity.

And then everything went straight into the crapper.

In 2013 Yahoo bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1 BILLION (!!!). In 2017, Verizon bought Yahoo, and acquired Tumblr in the transaction.

Then in December of 2017, new Tumblr CEO Jeff D'Onofrio made the bone-headed decision to ban any and all porn from the site. Why he thought this would be a good idea for the company is something known only to him.

The second the ban was announced, everyone and their dog (including me) predicted that Tumblr would go the way of powdered wigs, landlines and the cast of American Pie. You can't just clean up a site known for its porn and expect business as usual.

And we were right. In the days since the ban, users and content originators alike have fled the platform like rats from a sinking ship. To the point where Verizon wanted shed of the site before it dragged them down into the abyss with it.

So Tumblr, which was once worth $1.1 BILLION, was sold to Wordpress this month for the paltry of just $3 million dollars. Jesus Christ! From $1 billion to $3 million. Talk about pennies on the dollar! And all because Verizon was uncomfortable with a site that showed tits and wieners.

So let that be a lesson to every corporation out there: DON'T F*CK WITH PEOPLES' PORN!