Thread by @doctorow

Tumblr got sold for more than $1b to Yahoo. Yahoo sold its digital portfolio to Verizon for $4.5b. Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic (Wordpress) for a rumored $3m. Automattic is 10^7X better than Yahoo & Verizon combined, on the best day of their corporate lives.

1/

Now, Tumblr has updated its ad policy support page with the kind of verve and wit we expect from Automattic.

tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/artic…

2/

"HOW TO TURN OFF ADS: Unfortunately, until we live in a post-consumerist society built on an economy of surplus instead of scarcity that would enable us to procure both labor and materials at zero marginal cost, there is no way to remove ads from your Tumblr experience."

3/

I love this, but.

There's an equilibrium between ads & readers. It's maintained by adblockers. The way we killed ubiquitous popup ads was with on-by-default popup blockers (thanks, @Opera and @Mozilla!). They won the argument publishers had been losing with advertisers.

4/

Instead of saying, "Ugh, we don't want pop-up ads because they make our website terrible," publishers could say, "Sure, you have the market power, so if you insist we'll have pop-ups. But you should know that no one will see 'em, because they're blocked by default."

5/

Markets are places where bargains are struck. In a world where there is a glut of publishing inventory chasing ads, publishers are not a good proxy for their readers' interests. Ad-block is the way that readers bargain directly with advertisers.

eff.org/deeplinks/2019…

6/

As @dsearls says, ad-blocking is the largest consumer revolt in history.

/end