Tumblr will let you ditch its terrible ads for $4.99 a month

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Users can opt out of ads on the desktop and in its mobile apps by paying $4.99 per month or buying a year of ad-free browsing at a discount.

Image: Tumblr

That means long-time posters can go back to the way things were before Yahoo bought Tumblr for a billion dollars, before it banned porn and lost a lot of its audience, and before it was sold to Automattic Inc. for a tiny fraction of its original.

The company has been plagued by tacky, cheap-looking advertisements that seem to flood the feed and often make little to no sense since it bent on that principle. If you pay up, you can get the ad-free version of the site.

The pitch is not as appealing as it would have been when it was at its peak, but it does show new signs of life for the platform, that may be appreciated by anyone who is stuck around through the transitions. One way to tell long-time users that there is a future for Tumblr is to develop more new features that don't cost money, and the dashboard is a good start. For the next move, there's a free idea, which is to have a free version of the show, called Tumblr NSFW, for less than the cost of a subscription to high definition streaming service.