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Think of the Advertisers!: Difference between revisions
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== [[Web Original]] ==
* [[TV Tropes]], of course. See [[TV Tropes/The Situation]] and [[TV Tropes/The Second Google Incident]] for details about the process, in their own words.
* [[Tumblr]] castrated itself in December 2018, giving its userbase ''two weeks' warning'' that all "adult" blogs would be shut down. It also published a list of what it now considered "unacceptable" content -- including any and all LGBTQ communities but not Neo-Nazi or White Supremacist groups. (And on top of ''that'', Tumblr staff made [[Orwellian Editor|a deliberate, concerted effort to ''block'' volunteer teams who were hard at work trying to archive as much of the doomed content as they could]].) Prior to December 2018, ''one quarter'' of all Tumblr's traffic was generated by its NSFW content; another substantial fraction came from its supportive communities for alternative sexualities. ''Immediately'' following the announcement, users of ''every'' stripe began leaving Tumblr. Within ''two weeks'' of the announcement, the Staff account posted a desperate message trying to convince those reading it that things were not nearly as dire as they appeared and begging them not to leave the platform. Within a month, Tumblr's overall traffic had dropped by ''fifty percent'' and ''just kept dropping'', to the point that as of May 2019, Verizon -- who had bought Tumblr to monetize it, and had forced its sanitization -- had begun desperately shopping for someone to take the site off their hands. It was sold to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. in August 2019 for pennies on the dollar. See our [[Tumblr]] page for a bit more detail. Also, the move only removed the most outward NSFW content and the appropiately tagged stuff: pornbots (automated blogs that post naked pictures and links to camgirls and call girls services) still run rampant but go under the radar because they are untagged or use extremely generic content tags (like the tags for foodstuffs or popular fandoms that many peoplr in the site follow) that cannot be banned because of the actual legitimate content there, meaning that they cannot be as easily expelled as other NSFW sex-related content.
* [[Wikia]]'s crusade against [[Uncyclopedia]], from the intrusive [[Content Warnings]] in 2012 (which caused a permanent split in the English-language community, now [https://uncyclopedia.ca here] and [https://en.uncyclopedia.co here]) to their ultimately throwing twenty-two individual-language [[Uncyclopedia]] projects under the bus in 2019. Instead of honestly disclosing that the project still exists off-Wikia, they merely claim them to be "closed" in an attempt to keep (or divert) the traffic for themselves. There's a long list of other wikis destroyed by Wikia's efforts to [http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Closed_wikis delete any project which may offend advertisers]; the problem has been growing worse since 2018 in the wake of advertiser backlash on other platforms, like YouTube.
* The infamous Strikethrough and Boldthrough incidents on [[LiveJournal]] in 2007, where thousands of accounts were unilaterally suspended and deleted due to allegedly having "objectionable content" related with sexuality, a move that affected hundreds of fandom blogs (many of them from [[Slash]] and [[Lemon]] writers, but just as many of people who never posted anything objectionable and only had "Yaoi" or "Homosexuality" on their interest list), a literary discussion group for the book ''[[Lolita]]'', and even some support groups for survivors of sexual abuse. While originally blamed on a Christian organization (with said organization taking credit for the take down, even) and framed as a [[Paedo Hunt|crackdown on child porn content]] that accidentally went beyond the original scope, in retrospective it was obvious the purge coincided with their first attempts to attract ad revenue and with negotiations by then-owner SixApart to sell LJ to a Russian conglomerate -- 6A may not have orchestrated the purges, but they did get all the advantage they could get from the subsequent "clean up".
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