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Why does anyone care? Let people mark things as "adult" and move on. Youtube does this mostly, Blogger does this, why can't Yahoo and Tumblr?
Because it makes advertising a lot more complicated.
Youtube requires age verification if you want to see "adult" videos. I guess that many people want to browse that kind of content anonymously, so requiring the same on tumblr could cut the traffic a lot.
Weirdly, if its embedded it won't ask you to login. No age verification required.

So if you are paranoid and don't want to log in and start getting those videos in 'recommended for you' list. Just take the embed code put to it a .html file and open.

That's a good one for hackers - but not for most people ;)
You can also just add

  data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,
to the beginning of the code and paste it to your address bar.
On the other hand, it's probably harder to monetize users who want to remain anonymous, so they might not really care about that traffic.
That's possible. And I guess Yahoo knows how much of the traffic isn't porn related.
Youtube is porn-free though.
That depends on your definition. Youtube has plenty of nudity just not XXX stuff. Some of it is even provided by Youtube. Look under R rated movies.
nudity is very different from actual pornography.
What's porn and what's not is fairly subjective. I suspect the R-rated video for "Who's your Daddy" by Benny Benassi would be considered porn by some. Note: Both the R and PG-13 versions are (or were) on youtube.

Also note the definition of pornography does not include nudity.

Sure there are some things that some call art and some call porn. There are some things that some call sex education and some call porn. There are some things that everyone calls porn. Go to xtube.com and you can find lots of things that no-one will disagree is porn. So what do you do about that sort of content on tumblr or any other site?

(For the record, I'm pro-porn and pro-sex, sex is great!)

Actual adults aren't the only ones browsing the Internet. If my children can have pornographic content suggested while viewing an otherwise "reputable" site it makes monitoring their usage much harder.

Expecting that minors will respect an "adult" label is laughable, and anybody suggesting so knows it. It only takes a moments ill conceived curiosity to see something that will stay with a kid (or a person in general) forever.

Personally I hope that a company currently lead by a woman takes a hard stance on this issue.

Flickr and Tumblr have more in common than just the inability to buy a vowel. If the kind of things I've seen on Flickr have been allowed to exist for years under the Yahoo umbrella, I can't imagine that Tumblr's risque content is in any danger.
:O How deep did you go? I've never seen anything more risque than you'd see in a museum or art gallery on Flickr.
I found "compromising" pictures of a friend of a friend on flickr once. That having been said, it was shocking to find it on flickr, I can't think of any other time I saw content anywhere near that "vulgar". Certainly in my experience, flick is like .5% as "porny" as tumblr.
Tumblr has a massive amount of hardcore porn gifs and jpgs. Flickr does not.
Flickr has a massive amount of hardcore jpgs. That's where a lot of the images posted on Tumblr come from. Flickr just does a decent job of hiding it from the average user.

Here is a good (and mostly SFW as far as images) Flickr group that advises on how to work within Flickr's terms of service: http://www.flickr.com/groups/unsafe/

This is not even close to being the real problem, imho.

According to Google AdPlanner, Tumblr has between 14 million unique visitors per moth and between 5 and 10 million page impressions a day. Seriously, how does that justify this kind of a value for the company?

I'm pretty sure it's actually like 120 million a day.
Tumblr is directly tracked by Quantcast.

They do 65x million uniques per month and 5.4x billion pageviews.

The most concerning thing for Tumblr, is the fact that they've had zero net growth in traffic and uniques over the last year. And their monthly pageviews are down 2 billion versus a year ago. Their traffic is likely done growing. If Tumblr doesn't sell now, they're in deep shit.

Tumblr directors have given go signal to Yahoo offer. Now it's up to Yahoo director when they meet on Sunday

Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported Tumblr's board of directors approved Yahoo!'s offer and the Yahoo! board is expected to go along with Mayer's wish to buy Tumblr. There's still a little room for things to fall apart, but it's unlikely that's going to happen. So no, the Yahoo! deal will likely not be falling apart.

Well we'd all agree they've done a delightful job with Flickr, so let's see how quickly they can destroy Tumblr next!
Yah if Yahoo decides to shut down tumblr sometime in the future not even the Archive Team Will be able to save it
I'll be interested to see Marissa Mayer's stance on this - I wonder if she'll be as progressive as the media makes her out to be.
Okay - why porn is even problem? The people in 18-45 group have grown with porn, they have voluntarily and involuntarily seen and read porn they like, porn they don't like, kinky porn they like, kinky porn they don't like, they have been goatse-d, japanese whale-d, two girls one cup-ed and either don't mind porn or have become completely desensitized towards it.

And lets be honest a lot of top advertisements have not threaded carefully into innuendoland.

It shouldn't be one. But don't forget the effect of a corporate setting, which leads to people trying to behave like adults. Add american prudence (is that the right word?) concerning even nudity in the media, lawyers trying to protect the company and pr-people doing the same with a focus on public opinion. So I find it not hard to believe that the porn on tumblr will become an issue for them.
Add american prudence (is that the right word?)

The word you're looking for is "prudishness."

operating in certain countries may require paying attention to such things, same as for copyright violations and other "minor" offences.

While a smaller corp may ignore the issue, yahoo is big enough that it's guaranteed to have to pay attention to these things.

(Also: I have never heard of "japanese whale" and it worries me)

(Tubgirl, maybe? :S)
Yahoo's Flickr is one huge porn site sugarcoated a bit with legit content. You are never further than 3-4 clicks away from downright smut there.

So I think nothing will change.

Interesting, I've never seen porn on flickr. On the web porn is probably indeed never further than 3 to 4 clicks away so flickr likely is no exception but it depends very much on how you use the web. Unless I'm researching something I don't dive deep or follow many links so when someone asks me to look at a picture on flickr and then I leave again.

Are there any figures on what the percentage of adult content is on flickr?

When you have content filter off in the settings, usually a few clicks through groups, user profiles or favorites would lead you to explicit content and from there to really raunchy stuff. Safety filters on Flickr work really well, but try searching e.g. "wife" with Safe Search off, and the result will be very representative.

I have no figures what share of that is porn, but since (as an active user of the site) I stumble on it there without even looking I'd say it's very substantial.

me neither ,never saw a porn picture on flickr , and i used it a lot.
Settings > Privacy & Permissions > Content Filters > SafeSearch: off
Incredible amounts of money?
Why would Tumblr be singled out when Bing gets away with it? Bing goes so unnoticed that their image search is practically a porn engine (if you turn off safe search), and I've never heard an outcry about that.

Every female celebrity or politician has "nude" or "naked" somewhere in the suggested searches. To illustrate my point, do a Bing image search for Bill Clinton. Next, try it for Hillary. Not quite as bad, but try image searches for Barack and Michelle Obama. The top three suggestions for Michelle are Ass, Booty, and Butt. They may argue that they're just reflecting what users search for, but I have trouble believing that a lot of people are out there looking for nude photos of Nancy Pelosi.

Hell, the first non-image bing result for "men" is for gay porn.
The difference is that Tumblr is hosting the material, whereas Bing is indexing it. And, if you do a search from Bing (or Google, for that matter) from Singapore, the results are quite tame, whereas the tumblr website appears the same.

I do get your point though - Google has, as of late, even with safe search off, made it much more difficult to "trip across" porn on the internet (you really have to be looking for it) - whereas with Bing, it's basically, "We'll show you porn if there is a faint chance that it's relevant) - I.E. "redhead."

I tried a Bing image search for Michelle Obama. The suggestions I get are: wedding dress, craig robinson, 2007, dess, swimsuit, fashion, eyeroll, pregnant. And I turned off safe search.
Porn isn't the problem with Tumblr. The problem is copyrighted content.

In my experience, Tumblr is primarily a platform for young people to "reblog" (i.e. publish and distribute) copyrighted content without the owners' permission.

I'm not sure if that's such a big problem. Unlike with the movies and music industries, there's no big well-funded photography association that can "push" Yahoo beyond the requirements of the DMCA.
It's not so much re-blogging that's the problem but the "blogging" i.e. uploading it to tumblr in the first place. If a photo is already on tumblr, re-blogging doesn't really make another copy, it's all just links from then on.
Sigh, I wrote this as a comment, why couldn't I have written this article?
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