Tumblr loses nearly 30 percent of its page views after banning porn

Tumblr has suffered a massive drop in traffic since banning porn late last year.

In November 2018, Tumblr's iOS app was pulled from the Apple App Store because the site identified child pornography on the platform. Instead of cracking down specifically on the exploitation of minors, Tumblr responded in December by banning all pornography and sexually explicit content, entirely.

SEE ALSO: Tumblr will ban all adult content on Dec. 17

But NSFW posts were the lifeblood of Tumblr communities, and when that left the site, many of the users fled with it. PinkNews reports that traffic fell from 521 million monthly page views in December to 437 million in January, according to SimilarWeb analytics. By the end of February, Tumblr only received 369 million page views. That comes out to 151 million fewer page views, or a 29 percent drop.

Google Trends also shows a steady decline in interest in Tumblr — at the highest point over the last 90 days, Google ranked Tumblr at 100, or the "peak popularity for the term" on the day Tumblr's porn ban went into effect. On Wednesday, Google listed interest in Tumblr at only 34.

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Alexa reports that Tumblr's global rank fell by two spots over the last three months, from 66 to 68.

In a January 2017 study based on 130 million users, researchers from Bell Labs and two Italian universities concluded that about a quarter of Tumblr users were there for the NSFW content. In a statement to Motherboard, co-author Luca Aiello said he expected "this audience to experience a noticeable drop in engagement: Some of them will just churn out, many of them will likely reduce considerably the time spent on the platform."

Twitter users, meanwhile, mourned the loss of the social platform(s).

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It seems like Aiello was right. Tumblr, and all of the valuable communities that once flocked to it, is on the decline.

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