Tumblr and Camgirls, A Cam Girl Blog Service Update
In my last post on no-cost blogging services for cam girls I outlined the ‘big three’ (wordpress, blogger and tumblr) and explained how the acquisition of tumblr by Yahoo was causing concern amongst camgirls who were worried that their cam girl blogs would be shut down, or flagged as ‘adult’ by the service. At the time it appeared that tumblr, like blogger, was simply targeting affiliates who use these services to spam their advertisements for major porn companies (not cam girls), but over the past few days it appears that a small content site used heavily by camgirls has been affected by tumblr’s new stance on adult material, as have a few camgirls who posted material on tumblr that heavily linked to the content site.
The site in question, a small content site used by cam girls to sell videos and skype cam shows, featured a tumblr ‘auto-post’ function wherein advertisements for new video uploads were automatically published to tumblr when they were published on the content site. Now, posts containing the name of the site are blocked from tumblr, the ‘publish’ button grayed out for any post in which the name of the site appears. Not good 🙁
For what it’s worth I suspect that this particular content site was targeted by tumblr because of the volume of automatic posts containing affiliate links generated from the site. While I don’t agree with tumblr’s policy, these automatic posts containing affiliate links do fit the category of ‘affiliate spam’ in that the content is not unique and the entire purpose of these posts is to drive viewer traffic to a commercial adult site. From my perspective, the only change between then and now in terms of tumblr’s stance on adult is that it’s evident that cam girls can’t assume that we’ll fly ‘under the radar’ when it comes to policies intended to target spam affiliates. We cam girls and the sites we work are becoming big business, and it’s increasingly important that free blogging services are not used for automatically-generated, affiliate link-laden posts if we want to use them for our cam girl work.
For those who are interested in a new no-cost blogging service similar to tumblr that doesn’t have any restrictions on adult, soup.io seems to be becoming a viable alternative. While this service still doesn’t have nearly the amount of traffic one can find on tumblr, it’s growing and I do believe the customer traffic will eventually follow the adult content producers who use it. It’s a new service, but it’s an adult-friendly service that does not feature any of the restrictions of the ‘big three’ no-cost cam girl blog options.
In sum, while the censoring of adult content on tumblr is disappointing, it still doesn’t appear that cam girls are at any significant risk of having our blogs shut down if we’re smart about how we use them, and strive to create unique, meaningful content that is more than just a bunch of affiliate links. While it appears that camgirls and webcamming are becoming increasingly high-profile, and as such subject to the same scrutiny as other forms of adult content, we ARE unique in that our businesses are ourselves. We’re unique individuals, not static pay sites. If we put ourselves, our unique personalities into our work we’ll attract great customers AND stay within the guidelines of no-cost blogging services such as tumblr. Auto-generated posting may be efficient but it’s not creative, and it doesn’t differentiate us from spam affiliates. Take the time to write your own content, use affiliate links sparingly and these services still do have some value.
An Update on an Update
So appears that tumblr has reversed it’s stance regarding the content site I’ve referred to above. Yay 🙂 Still, a lot of independent camgirls are pretty upset with the censoring of adult content on tumblr, and understandably so. While a few camgirls are leaving tumblr in protest, I guess I look at it like free blogs aren’t going to be around forever anyways. They aren’t something we pass down to our grandkids 🙂 We don’t own them, and thus, our control over the content we post there is somewhat limited. That’s the trade-off I guess. I still think tumblr is a great way to meet new customers and it’s ideal for skype camgirls who aren’t able or willing to put the immense effort that goes into running and promoting a full website (I love it but fuck it’s a lot of work). I’ll take the good with the bad, I guess.
Happy camming 🙂
