Tumblr Traffic Takes Major Hit Following Its December Porn Ban

It’s been three months since Tumblr announced that it was taking down all NSFW (not safe for work) content including explicit pornographic content and since then many threatened to boycott the site but Tumblr didn’t budge. Well it looks like the decision has now taken its toll on the social blogging site with respect and this just gives credence to the claim by some that they only visited the site for adult content.

Tumblr’s traffic has dropped about 30 percent since December. Tumblr’s worldwide traffic in December came in at 521 million, yet it had dropped to 370 million by February, web research company SimilarWeb told The Verge.

The figures have closely been corroborated by another research company Statista which now says from a high of 642 million visitors last year July, the figure dropped to 437 million in January 2019. Even the figures don’t tally, they all agree that Tumblr has seen a significant drop in traffic since the December decision.

The new Tumblr restriction removes from the feed all explicit content, including any media that depicted sex acts, uncovered private parts, and all form of nudity. Even as some say they can still some kind of nudity on the site, many have obviously left Tumblr in large numbers. We realize that the site was fundamentally known for its NSFW content, which was frequently not simply pornography. This argument stems from the fact that some actually use the site to engage the public in “healthy” sexual discussions.

Tumblr had said back in December that it won’t be banning all forms of nudity. It will make special cases for non-sexual substance, including breastfeeding photographs and “health-related situations”, for example, sex-reassignment medical procedures and mastectomies.

Many social media sites including the popular names feature some kind of adult content regardless of site policies. Many other degrade it such that you would have to search hard to see those content but haven’t come out deliberately to clamp down on such content like Tumblr has. The challenge with Tumblr is that it simply had so much of such content appearing in the feed of other users that it had to do something.

Well that decision has affected its traffic but maybe it will gain some more users over time who may now want to use the site for educative purposes.