Who owns tumblr

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Tumblr took a hit in December when Verizon announced a plan to clean up the site by banning all adult content. Tumblr's adult content ban dismays some users: 'It was a safe space'. Read more. Topics Tumblr Verizon Communications news. Reuse this content. Do you expect that kind of scale for Tumblr, or do you expect it to be more of a social network?

The primary user experience is going to be that social network. No one really objected or talked about it too much, but effectively, they turned off the part that allowed you to put external content into the Facebook News Feed and everything. That was actually a big change in how the open web worked because previously all of the social networks had had some sort of way to get things in and out.

I would love to bring features like that back because I would love for Tumblr to be a better part of the open web. It really sounds like you want to be a competitor to the big social networks in terms of user attention, openness, politeness, strength of community. I want to create a place on the web, which is fun and supportive and substantial.

At one point, blogging had a real magic to it. A frisson. But it also was totally distributed and people had their own designs, and all those sorts of things.

I think we can bring some of that back and reimagine it in the mobile world which is where Tumblr is also super strong. Julia Alexander: Tumblr also has a bunch of major issues. It has seen major issues around mass shootings and the way [some users] glorify shooters that [Tumblr has] had to address. Do you plan to actively go in and try to clean this up, or are you just going to leave it be in the way that Verizon has?

These are very, very difficult problems. So I do not want to trivialize or say that anything, even if you work really hard on it, will be percent. But one of the things that excites me is that Tumblr has a great trust and safety team, and so does the rest of Automattic that works on WordPress.

And what have we navigated with the nuance of content that people host on WordPress, and how can we use that to inform and really encourage a healthy community on Tumblr as well. Nilay Patel: Do you see these platforms coming together? I get the sense that you intend to keep them apart, which makes sense: one is a very user-centric social network, the other is a publishing platform.

But do you envision them coming ever closer together, or just more on the policies, procedures, backend stuff? I would love for them to interoperate. WordPress, we think of as the open web operating system.

It powers 34 percent of web sites now. It should be able to power everything that Tumblr does, but what I would call the Tumblr app, the user experience, the dashboard, that will always be its own unique thing and evolve in its own way because it is something distinct from everything else on the web. There was microblogging, photo blogging, audio blogging, which is podcasting.

These are all kind of forms of things that were originally pioneered on blogging. Yet all of these things have become so balkanized. What kind of experience people can create for themselves and really make it something where they choose what they follow? Is that role something you can fill? When you think of time well spent online, when you think about people getting more control over how they put their attention and their time.

Think about their data: are they investing their data into a place where it can come back out? Do they have true ownership? These are all things that never go out of style. We have peaks and troughs of openness on the web. I think we are exiting a trough. I hope to work on these issues literally the rest of my life. So I want to keep working to create the kind of web that if I ever have children that I want them to grow up with. Julia Alexander: You said you wanted to introduce more advertising to Tumblr.

But I do think that the advertising they did do is significantly lower than what you would expect. It makes it significantly less than what you would expect for the amount of traffic and audience.

Tumblr is such a niche audience. It gets away with being so weird. Do you worry that bringing in ads will affect the community? I think there is an opportunity there. My understanding is, right now, most of the ads are programmatic, which means network ads. But I have high hopes that the weirdness — what I would describe as the beauty of the Tumblr community — is actually really, really appealing.

And we should do a good job with advertising. Now, I will also couch that by saying Automattic is not an advertising company. I think that can be really healthy and really positive as well. Nilay Patel: How do you think about the relationship to creators? Is there a way to empower and compensate the creators?

Tumblr is such a force of culture. Let me talk about what we do for that on WordPress. So one, we have WordPress.

We have a program called WordAds that allows people to run ads.