Tumblr porn will be reborn

NOTE: For all latest, breaking news related to Tumblr adult content ban as well as its alternatives, head here.

Needless to start this post informing that Tumblr has stopped support for NSFW content. Everyone knows it already. In fact, it was one of the top news stories of December last year.

Community enjoys arguing if Tumblr will survive after this decision. The second question that’s being discussed is: who is going to occupy the niche. Like any big service, Tumblr had many use cases, several user personas, and few types of most popular content.

Main content type

Arguably the most popular content type was gifs and, as users call them, gifsets (gallery posts with gifs made from common video displaying hottest scenes from it). I believe comparatively good user experience for browsing gifsets was the first factor of Tumblr’s success.

Success factors

Since Tumblr is 100% user generated content, its “creators” and their posts are the main traffic driver. So let’s take a look at what made the platform attractive for them. In my opinion there are two main features:

1) Blog layouts: The layout makes creators feel they got a standalone personal site. Not just a profile page somewhere deep inside a social network surrounded by the network’s logo, top navigation, ads etc. Creators/authors never got a vibe they are ants in a big anthill.

2) Exposure and promotion of bloggers’ content to community: The Tumblr community has powerful tools to express its attitude by liking and reblogging. So creators feel their efforts are being appreciated – they become extremely motivated seeing thankful reaction.

Compare this to, say, a blog based on Wordpress or Blogger, using which you effectively remain in the middle of nowhere.

Who will come next?

The first team that will realize the aforementioned factors are a key to success (or simply will try to copy all features that Tumblr had) will take the niche.

So far, from our overview, most articles either recommend porn subreddits (as category based gif links aggregators) or social apps more tolerant to adult content.

There’s just one initiative that’s pretty close.

iLOOPit

iloopit.net is a community of NSWF gif bloggers. The service provides its users a tool to make gifs, cutting episodes from NSFW videos. At the same time it hosts all those created gifs, providing nice browsing experience, filters by category, user, and popularity.

So the product already has a lot of features. Including those Tumblr never had – gif creating online tool and browser extension. It was developed by a small team of enthusiasts. And now when it’s time to evolve to a blogging platform they decided to crowd source some funding at indiegogo.

iLOOPit is looking to collect just $30k which seems pretty small amount to finance such development and marketing. Hope their humbleness will look attractive to backers. Let’s wish them luck and follow the updates.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post, made possible in association with iLOOPit. It’s written by iLOOPit co-founder Aiden Cross with minor editing done by team PiunikaWeb. All images used in the story were provided by iLOOPit.

NOTE: PiunikaWeb has covered in detail the Tumblr adult content ban as well as the platform’s alternatives, check out all updates here.