If the results of a recent study are any indication, Tumblr users are horny.
Researchers from two Italian universities and Bell Labs set out to study how the “community” of porn consumers and producers related to the larger community of social media users. Do consumers and creators of adult content segregate themselves from everyone else, or are they just part of the gang? How many people are “unintentionally” exposed to pornography on social networks? What do the demographics look like?
Because porn is primarily a visual medium, the researchers picked the photo-blogging sites Flickr and Tumblr (both owned by Yahoo, which apparently harbors some irrational fear of the letter E) as their lab. They looked at 130 million Tumblr users and 39 million Flickr users (about half the user base of each platform), and reached some surprising conclusions.
For one thing, only a small percentage of users upload adult content to either site: .1 percent of Tumblr users and .43 percent of Flickr users. It’s interesting to note that Flickr, a platform that filters uploads for age-appropriate viewing and bans explicit material, attracts a larger percentage of porn creators than Tumblr, which adopts a mostly hands-off censorship policy. For bandwidth reasons, Tumblr doesn’t allow users to upload racy videos, but the platform does allow producers to embed them.
The really interesting numbers emerged when examining the percentage of viewers who interacted with content posted by others. The researchers categorized viewers as “consumers” if they actively followed or shared a producer’s material. Users who didn’t follow any adult-content producers but viewed adult material second-hand (in the feed of someone they followed), the researchers called them “unintentional consumers.”
Flickr doesn’t allow sharing in the conventional sense, so its numbers for both groups were low: 5 percent consumers and 12 percent unintentional. Overall, 82 percent of Flickr users were not exposed to porn at all.
Tumblr, on the other hand, appears to be where all the porn fans congregate. According to the researchers, 22.5 percent of Tumblr’s user population fit the research definition of “consumers.” Another 28.5 percent fall in the “unintentional” category. Together, the two groups encompass more than half of all Tumblr users.
As for demographics, the researchers discovered men and women composed equal parts of adult users 18 to 25 years old on both networks. As ages increased, though, gender percentages skewed toward the male side. Overall, Tumblr users tend toward the younger, female side of the spectrum while Flickr users tend to be older and male.
