There's a lot of porn on Tumblr.
But there's more than just NSFW content on the platform, Tumblr founder David Karp told talk show host Stephen Colbert last night.
There's a lot of everything, Karp said.
Colbert pushed Karp a little further, asking him if porn would stay on Tumblr.
"Look, we've taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users, creation, whatever that looks like, and it's just not something that we want to police," Karp said. "When you have somebody like Terry Richardson [a photographer known for his sexy photo shoots] or any number of very talented photographers posting tasteful photography, I don't want to have to go in there to draw the line between this photo and the behind the scenes photo of lady gaga and like, her nip."
When Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion in May, people thought it would be worthless because advertisers don't want to place ads next to pornographic content.
As we previously noted, Tumblr is an opt-in model, meaning the user chooses who to follow. Tumblr's core users log into the service and subscribe to different blogs. And that's where all of the advertising happens, directly within the service rather than on the blogs themselves. All those blogs are fed into one dashboard.
So even if there happens to be a porn blog in the dashboard, it's because you opted in to follow it, and it will be mixed among other content. In short, advertisers don't really need to worry too much about porn on Tumblr.