By M. Christian

YNOT – During the F.ounders conference in New York City recently, Tumblr founder and Chief Executive Officer David Karp teased the audience with developments on the horizon at the popular microblogging platform that combines elements of both Facebook and Twitter.

For starters, Tumblr has gone commercial. An $85-million investment by technology startup backer CrunchFund has been earmarked for exploration of what Karp characterized as new advertising models. Karp sees Tumblr as a brand-building force with which to be reckoned: He envisions the platform becoming an equalizer of sorts between enormous mega-brands and “the little guys” who often find themselves shouted down by deeper pockets.

Of course, how Tumblr’s radical free-speech notions will play with potential advertisers is another matter altogether. The platform has been excoriated by users for its refusal to rein in posters of things like pornography and racial epithets. Tumblr’s typical response falls in the neighborhood of “everybody be polite and mark your posts as potentially offensive so those who don’t want to see them know not to look.”

“If you regularly post sexual or adult-oriented content, respect the choices of people in our community who would rather not see such content by flagging your blog (which you can do from the Settings page of each blog) as Not Suitable for Work (‘NSFW’),” Tumblr’s Community Guidelines state. “This action does not prevent you and your readers from using any of Tumblr’s social features, but rather allows Tumblr users who don’t want to see NSFW content to avoid seeing it.”

As it has everywhere else, such a commonsense, community based approach to content policing has caused some observers — and some users — to label Karp and his creation dangerously subversive. At the same time, others respond with hopeful cheers.

According to Karp, pornography is the least of his worries. He told the F.ounders audience that only 2-4 percent of Tumblr’s content is adult in nature.

The accuracy of his assertion already has been challenged, but if Karp and company remain loyal to their pre-hitting-the-big-time convictions, Tumblr may emerge as a viable adult-entertainment alternative to porn-averse Facebook and Twitter.