• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, October 21, 2019

In the early days of the web, fondly known as the Wild Wild West of the web, AOL generated a ton of early traffic with its wide-open and often raw sexual chat rooms. As we moved from text to images to video, NSFW content grew. But now as consolidation and ownership narrows to a handful of larger companies, the world of raw content is no longer what it used to be.

Tumblr used to be a well-trafficked home for porn, kink, bondage/domination, and other legal but not-safe-for-work communities. But after its sale to AOL, and AOL’s sale to Verizon, the now Verizon-owned Tumblr said adult content was no longer welcome on the platform. Tumblr traffic fell off a cliff. In August, Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress’ owner Automattic Inc. The sales price wasn’t released, but insiders say it was a tiny portion of the  $1.1 billion Yahoo paid for Tumblr in 2013.

So is NSFW going to return with new ownership? Matt Mullenweg, the CEO and founder of Automattic, told Hacker News, “Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety… it’s a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there.” Mullenweg continued “I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.”

And Mullenweg is not alone. Imgur, the highly trafficked image-sharing site, posted this week that it will no longer display content from Reddit’s NSFW subreddits. A quick search confirms this. If you search for r/NSFW on Imgur, a new landing page comes up that reads: “As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits.”

Today, imgur gets 274 million monthly visitors, making it one of the most popular sites in the US. Imgur described the decision in a post, saying:  “Over the years, these pages have put Imgur’s user growth, mission, and business at risk.”

But even as the legacy NSFW hosts abandon their freewheeling and open ways, new sites are arriving to take their place.

One of the new players is newTumbl. newTumbl isn’t built to be for porn. “We would like to be a complete site, from kittens all the way up to anything legal,” Dean Abramson, founder and CEO, told Fast Company. “But we know that right now, probably 90% of our users are here for adult content.” Others include sites Sharesome, xstumbl, and BDSMLR.

Meanwhile. the big player in the space is facing challenges of its own. Pornhub says it serves 110 million daily visitors — but it’s now the target of lawsuits from women who appeared in videos produced by the company known as Girls Do Porn. The trial has been going on since last summer, when a videographer who shot for the production company testified the company lied, luring women into having sex on video by promising the videos would never be posted online. Until last week, Pornhub was hosting dozens of videos from Girls Do Porn on its site.

The nature of online porn is changing as technology changes the way porn is produced, shared, and even manufactured. Pornhub has banned “deepfake” face-swap porn videos. These videos use AI to put the faces of celebrities onto the body of porn stars. The practice is done without the celebrity’s consent, leading many opponents of the videos to classify them in the same league as revenge porn.

Revenge porn has grown in recent years and is now the subject of legal challenges, claiming it is protected free speech. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled last week that revenge porn isn’t protected.

And the state of California has passed two bills. One makes it illegal to post any manipulated videos of political figures, putting a candidate’s face on a fake body, with the intention to injure them. The second gives people the right to sue someone who uses deepfake technology to put their image into a pornographic video.

Deepfakes. Fraud. And the shift of NSFW content from established sites to a list of new startups. Sex on the web is changing, and by all accounts, becoming more of a  battlefield. It’s hard to be nostalgic about the “good old days of Tumblr,” but that does seem to be where we’ve ended up.