Can Yahoo Ignore Tumblr's Dark Side?

When my daughter begged me a few years ago to go on Tumblr so she could engage with Harry Potter fandom, I said no. I was worried about what else she might encounter on the vast blogging service.

You know what I’m talking about. I feared she’d stumble onto porn.

Tumblr, which Yahoo is buying for $1.1 Billion is not a porn site, far from it. Spend any time on the spotlight page and you see it’s a vast sea of insightful and entertaining posts on every topic imaginable.

One user aptly described it this way:

Tumblr user: Don't do it. It will consume your life.
Tumblr user: It's like having a stoner conversation with the world.
Tumblr user: It's crawling with intellectual knowledge, cats, and fandom.

Yet, like any vast, largely unmoderated social platform, it’s also got a lot of porn (by some measures at least 10%), and a fair amount of potential phishing sites. And as with the rest of the web, all of this is only a search or tag away.

Don’t Ever Change

As rumors of Yahoo’s plans began to leak last week, Tumblr users grew more and more nervous. Some promised to leave Tumblr if Yahoo bought it. Others worried that Yahoo would sanitize the vibrant community.

Many used history as their guide. Geocities was a massive complex of blogs and blog rings that Yahoo bought in 1999 for $3.6 billion. A decade later, Geocities was gone.

Those concerns prompted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to start her acquisition announcement in a most unusual way: “We promise not to screw it up.”

Considering how different the 2013 Yahoo is from the 1999 one, and even from the 2011 model, I’d say these fears are unfounded. Yahoo and Mayer are promising to use the Facebook-Instagram model, a mostly hands-off approach that accelerates the acquired company’s growth (and its own) by focusing on infrastructure, dev resources and (of course) advertising.

There won’t even be Yahoo branding on Tumblr. So where’s the concern?

Have We Seen This Before

I fear that Yahoo could have a News Corp/MySpace problem with the blogging/social network. When News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 (for roughly half what Yahoo paid for Tumblr), they had no idea what a mess they had just inherited. It was vast, unorganized and stuffed full of unruly members who did not like to be controlled.

Within a year, it was dealing with headlines like this: Universal sues MySpace for copyright violations. And this: Girl, 14, Sues MySpace.com Over Alleged Sexual Assault.

News Corp didn’t create these problems. But as MySpace’s new parent company, it could not ignore them. The acquisition ultimately proved disastrous. News Corp sold MySpace in 2011 at a significant loss.

Does Marissa Mayer truly understand what she just bought? Tumblr is a felxible, free and great platform and social community. I liked it so much I launched my own blog, Techoti, on it. But just as with MySpace, there is a significant underbelly. In the case of Tumblr, it’s the vast amounts of adult material lurking just beneath the surface.

Tumblr is well aware of this. On its Tumblr iOS app page it warns: “You must be at least 17 years old to download this app. Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity.” The age restriction is from Apple. But the Cupertino company is reacting to what it’s seen on the blog network.

Tumblr’s Terms of Service, however, seems blissfully ignorant of this fact. They will allow anyone older than 13 to use the service. Trust me, there are images on Tumblr that no 13 year-old should see. They’d normally be classified as adult material suitable for users 18 and older.

It’s not that Tumblr is encouraging this kind of content. But they’re also doing nothing to discourage it.

New Audience, New Rules

As a site populated by teens and tweens who are likely more street savvy than their parents, this might not be a problem. But as Marissa Mayer noted, Yahoo and Tumblr have to very different demographics. With the integration of some services, like making Tumblr content visible via Yahoo search and Yahoo’s personalized news feed, some older Yahooers are about to get their first taste of Tumblr-ville.

I don’t expect that search results and news feeds will reveal any objectionable content. However, if someone follows a thread from result, to user, to reblogs and scrolls down to the occasional pornographic images, they may be more than a little shocked.

Mayer did sorta, kinda address this issue in her announcement call on Tuesday. A reporter asked about the kind of content that exists on Tumblr and how the brands she’s hoping to attract to the service might react. "It’s not as brand safe as what’s on our site,” she admitted, adding that Yahoo will address any advertisers concern about brand safety by having “good tools for targeting.”

Put simply, there’s no plan to eradicate non-brand-safe content. They’ll just steer advertisers the other way. That’s probably a good plan for brands, but doesn’t address consumers.

I think there’s tremendous upside to this acquisition: vast amounts of great, creative content, access to fervent fandoms for Harry Potter, Dr. Who, network shows and other nerdy pursuits. That’s what Yahoo doesn’t want to “screw up.”

It’s a good strategy that will last right up until the first time someone sues Yahoo for something they saw on Tumblr.

I did eventually let my daughter, now 15, join Tumblr. She’s been on for a year and loves it. She connected with her fellow Whovians and Potterheads, and thanks to all of them, got hooked on the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes. She also told me she’s learned more about life from Tumblr than she learned in school. I’m not exactly sure what this means. To be honest, I’m a little afraid to ask.

Source : mashable