Five questions about OnlyFans and the future of the adults-only internet
Porn drives tech revolutions. So what happens now?
It has now been five days since OnlyFans announced that it would walk away from a market that it all but invented: subscription-based adult content. Beginning in October, the site’s updated terms of service will prevent creators from uploading sexually explicit materials, which helped the platform attract more than 130 million users and generate more than $2 billion last year. If I were to make a list of the year’s most surprising stories about tech platforms, this one would go at the top.
It’s true that sex workers on the platform had long worried that OnlyFans would ban them, particularly after last year, when mainstream celebrities began making their way onto the site and selling less controversial content. But few predicted such a change would happen quite so abruptly, and with so many questions about the platform’s future still unanswered. Today I want to talk through the most interesting of those questions, and speculate a bit on what happens next.
I think there’s a good chance that, a few years from now, OnlyFans’ move here may be seen as a watershed in the evolution of the consumer internet.
1. Why did OnlyFans change its service, and why now?
Initially, the company said “mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers” had been behind the change. Banks have had porn sites under a microscope since an exposé on Pornhub in the New York Times last December found that it and other so-called tube sites hosted videos posted without the consent of the people appearing in them, including some who were underage. Visa and Mastercard stopped providing services for Pornhub afterward; Mastercard subsequently adopted new rules for sellers of adult content.
That led to speculation that Mastercard’s rule changes were behind OnlyFans’ move, including in this viral thread that I retweeted. But in his first interview today since the changes were announced, OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely said that it was banks, rather than payment processors, who were to blame. OnlyFans is in compliance with Mastercard’s rules, he told the Financial Times. But three banks the site works with have often refused to transfer payments from fans to creators.
Bank of New York Mellon, JPMorgan Chase and the United Kingdom’s Metro Bank have closed corporate accounts with OnlyFans or its creators, Stokely told Patricia Nilsson:
“We pay over one million creators over $300m every month, and making sure that these funds get to creators involves using the banking sector,” he said, singling out Bank of New York Mellon as having “flagged and rejected” every wire connected to the company, “making it difficult to pay our creators”.
Sadly, all three of those banks declined to comment when the FT asked. But they didn’t deny it, either.
Even if you accept the idea that priggish banks are behind OnlyFans’ move, it’s worth saying that OnlyFans appears not to have fought their decision. Maybe that’s because, realistically, they can’t win. But you can also imagine a world in which OnlyFans had talked openly about how banks were moving to deny creators a livelihood and campaigned for more reasonable rules around payment processing. Thousands of creators would have joined them, and I imagine a lot of those creators’ fans would have, too.
That the company capitulated instead, while giving hardly any notice to its biggest category of creators by far, gives weight to the criticisms from sex workers on the platform that OnlyFans used them to build up its business only to discard them when they became inconvenient.
2. What happens to sex on the internet now?
Nothing, yet. But watch this space.
As The Verge’s Adi Robertson noted today, Tumblr, Patreon, and eBay have all dramatically restricted the sale or display of adult content in recent years. This is not solely a banking issue: Apple and Google restrict sexually explicit material in apps, making platforms choose between hosting porn and having an app available in an app store at all.
Meanwhile, the passage of FOSTA-SESTA in 2018 created an exception to Section 230 that lets platforms be held liable if they are found to be complicit in sex trafficking. Just this week, a judge ruled that a lawsuit against Twitter could proceed under FOSTA-SESTA after two men sued the company complaining that it had been slow to remove sexually explicit materials of them when they were underage. Fears over similar lawsuits have been reshaping the internet ever since the law was passed; it’s why Craiglist no longer hosts any personal ads, for example.
But if there was one clear lesson from the rise of OnlyFans, it’s that there are billions of dollars to be made by hosting the kind of subscription-based, creator-driven porn that it pioneered, and someone is going to make that money. Already, Protocol reports, thousands of OnlyFans creators have defected to JustFor.Fans, a similar site that had initially catered to male creators.
“I don't know what their play was, but our play is to make money in the adult entertainment space, period,” Dominic Ford, JustFor.Fans’ disarmingly candid CEO, told Protocol. “Those eyes are wide enough, I don't need wider eyes. If we can replace OnlyFans, who evidently were pulling in something like $150 million a month, trust me, I'll be fine."
The question is whether Ford’s site will be able to remain in good standing with the payment processors his creators will depend on.
In the meantime, anti-porn activists seem to have notched a significant victory. As Gustavo Turner explained in a comprehensive piece in XBiz earlier this year, religious groups and anti-porn crusaders are using a two-pronged approach to get porn off the internet: enlist politicians to restrict its availability, and put pressure on banks and payment processors to drop porn sites as customers. Both efforts are having success.
If they succeed with OnlyFans and its current and future clones, it’s unlikely they’ll stop. From there they’ll go after more mainstream platforms where porn is available — most notably Twitter. A company that, incidentally, is about to let its creators begin selling subscription content directly to fans. And has thousands of porn creators using the platform already.
As one informed observer put it to me recently: “The fate of the horny internet economy now rests on the shoulders of the policy team for Twitter Super Follows.”
3. What happens to sex workers now?
Given that the year’s big story in platforms has been the democratization of creative work, you might expect that sex workers would begin forming online co-ops and selling their work directly to consumers. (It’s worth repeating: this work is totally legal!)
But as Charlotte Shane explains at The Cut, that’s much easier said than done:
In an increasingly cashless economy, the banking industry exerts a terrifying degree of control over us all, but sex workers have long been especially vulnerable to denial of accounts, loans, and mortgages, regardless of whether or not their work is technically legal. Paypal, Venmo, Stripe, Square, CashApp, and ApplePay all have terms of service that forbid payment for any sort of sexual product or service — again, including those that are legal — and those processors can also refuse sex workers just by virtue of their engagement in the sex industry, even if their use of the platform is unrelated. While many sex workers have tried to pivot to cryptocurrency, it’s far from a permanent solution, and even as a stopgap requires fresh-tech literacy and the time to acquire it, which are luxuries many workers can’t afford.
Meanwhile, the answer to my knee-jerk question — can’t they just accept Bitcoin? — is also more complicated than I hoped. A big reason: people eventually need to convert their crypto holdings into fiat money to pay their bills. And when they do, they are once again subject to the whims of the banking industry, which as Shane notes can reject them for merely suspecting they make porn.
4. What happens to OnlyFans now?
The conventional wisdom is that OnlyFans’ business will collapse and go the way of MoviePass. The conventional wisdom seems … pretty solid to me?
If you want to know what OnlyFans thinks is going to happen to OnlyFans, check out this company blog post from July, in which the company profiles four “OnlyFans creators you should follow in 2021.” They include a personal trainer, another personal trainer, a former contestant on Love Island, and a former cast member on The Real Housewives of Miami.
The mix of fitness tips, behind-the-scenes footage, and promotions for their other hustles offers a good idea of what non-porn creators are selling on the platform. Speaking for myself, this is stuff I wouldn’t look at for free — and even if I did want to look, I could find plenty of freely available substitutes on YouTube. And if I wanted to interact with celebrities, I would do so on Cameo, which has already built the porn-free celebrity creator platform that OnlyFans now seems eager to ape.
In his FT interview, OnlyFans’ Stokely says he hopes to keep porn creators on the platform (selling something other than porn), and that “he would ‘absolutely’ welcome porn back were the banking environment to change.”
I’m not sure OnlyFans will be around long enough to reverse course. But the company has at least one thing going for it: its porn creators made the company so much money, and so profitably, that it likely has a healthy cash cushion to attempt one of the all-time Hail Mary pivots in the history of internet media.
5. Seriously, though: is this the moment that crypto payments finally goes mainstream?
I accept the idea that for the most part, creators need to be paid in fiat money. But I also know that the history of technology is closely intertwined with porn: it’s widely credited with helping to popularize the VCR, cable TV, and the early internet.
Nowadays, the nerds are all salivating over the idea of rebuilding the entire internet on the blockchain, decentralizing control away from the big platforms and giving users fractional ownership of all the media they encounter. There’s a lot of talk about “decentralized autonomous organizations,” or DAOs, which run on rules created by the community and encoded as software. I won’t pretend to know exactly how we get from the blockchain to a bulletproof replacement for OnlyFans, but it seems reasonable to me that someone will.
All of the hubbub this year about non-fungible tokens, from NBA Top Shot to CryptoPunks to Pudgy Penguins, has pointed in the direction of a coming shift in the way we buy, consume, and even profit from media. If history is any guide, porn will play a major role in that shift. And with porn now under threat on what the nerds are calling Web2, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it gradually migrate to what they’re calling Web3, normalizing the use of crypto payments for good.
And when it does, porn might bring along a good fraction of the internet along with it.
Governing
⭐ Sites that share news in a misleading way are getting more engagement on Facebook and Twitter than ever before, according to a new study. But the report from the German Marshall Fund also found that publications that repeatedly share false information are getting less distribution than before. Here’s Cristiano Lima in the Washington Post:
More than 1 in 5 interactions — such as shares, likes or comments — with U.S. sites from April to June happened on “outlets that gather and present information irresponsibly,” according to a report by the German Marshall Fund.
This includes outlets such as the Daily Wire, TMZ, the Epoch Times and Breitbart that researchers say “distort or misrepresent information to make an argument or report on a subject,” a metric determined by NewsGuard, a website cited in the study that rates the credibility of news sources. Researchers say these sources, which they argue spread subtler but still harmful forms of misinformation, are decidedly different from sites that publish overtly false news.
⭐ Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative backed by the United Nations, added the Taliban to its list of terrorist organizations. Platforms rely on the group’s hashes to determine which terrorist content to remove; this move effectively accelerates efforts to deplatform the Taliban even as they begin to rule Afghanistan. (Issie Lapowsky / Protocol)
An investigation into the effect of labeling Donald Trump tweets that contained election misinformation found that tweets that Twitter put warning labels on generally spread farther than those that did not. After being blocked by Twitter, the tweets were posted on other sites and got lots of attention there. (Note that the authors are only demonstrating correlation here; they are not arguing that labeling tweets causes them to spread.) (Misinformation Review)
Twitter added a warning label to a Canadian politician after a video clip she shared omitted relevant context. There really should be an archive of these labeled tweets somewhere. (Ashley Burke / CBC)
Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy are scheduled to visit the White House this week to talk about cybersecurity. The CEOS of Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are expected to discuss efforts to protect the supply chain against cyber attacks. (Rebecca Kern, Mark Gurman, and Spencer Soper / Bloomberg)
Apple and Google are seeking the Biden administration’s help in fighting off a South Korean law that could compel them to add third-party payment systems. Trade officials have yet to take a position on the bill; similar bills are making their way through state legislatures. (David McCabe and Yu Young Jin / New York Times)
A look at how the federal government’s inaction on tech regulations has led to a patchwork of laws around the country as local and state governments fill the void. "What are we going to do? Sit around and wait for Congress to get its act together?" billionaire Jim Steyer asked. "That's an insane strategy if you really care about the issues."(Ben Brody / Protocol)
How interests groups are aiming different messages at vaccine hesitant-people using Facebook’s targeted advertising. A rare positive story about targeted ads from a major newspaper, though it’s unclear how effective these ads are. (Jeremy B. Merrill and Drew Harwell / Washington Post)
A profile of Vaccine Talk, a Facebook group where mothers attempt to reduce vaccine hesitancy through open debate and intensive moderation. Despite the pro-vaccine nature of the site, the moderators say they have routinely had threads deleted for containing “misinformation.” (Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus and Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post)
A review of Facebook’s ad library shows an increasing number of ads advocating for the use of the anti-parasite medicine ivermectin on human beings, despite no clinical evidence that it protects against COVID-19. “The FDA has recently begun outright begging the American public to stop using ivermectin to treat COVID, writing in a recent tweet, ‘You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Come on, y’all. Stop it.’” (Anna Merlan / Vice)
At least nine activists in Bahrain were targeted by their government using zero-click iPhone exploits from NSO Group. Bahrain actively censors the internet and uses spyware against dissidents. (Citizen Lab)
Opponents of the autocratic regime in Belarus are releasing hacked databases from the secret police and government agencies in an effort to bring down Lukashenko. “The information contains lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system.” (Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg)
Industry
⭐ Facebook is bringing some parts of Messenger back to the main app after spinning it out in 2014. Some users are now able to place voice or video calls from Facebook. (Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg)
You can once again buy the Oculus Quest 2 following a pause in sales due to concerns about possible skin irritation. Current owners can request a free silicone mask if they want one. (Jay Peters / The Verge)
Substack acquired the team behind Cocoon, a paid social app made by former Facebook employees. It’s unclear what they’ll be working on at Substack; Cocoon will continue as an independent app, for now. (Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios)
TikTok added in-app shopping through a partnership with Shopify. Shopify also recently expanded its efforts to build storefronts on Facebook. (Erin Woo / New York Times)
TikTok launched an augmented reality effects studio app in beta. Facebook and Snap built similar tools, which seem to have been effective in courting developers. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)
Spotify-owned Anchor will begin letting all US-based creators sell podcast subscriptions. “Spotify says it’s also adding more pricing options — 20 up from three — and is giving podcasters the ability to download their paying subscribers’ email addresses.” (Ashley Carman / The Verge)
A profile of Invisible Universe, which is creating fanbases around digital creations on TikTok and other platforms. Founded by a former Snap executive, the company has had a hit creating a digital version of a doll owned by Serena Williams’ daughter. (Nicole Laporte / Fast Company)
Those good tweets
Talk to me
Send me tips, comments, questions, and porn-friendly banking options: casey@platformer.news.
Devil's advocate here: Casey I don't think you've spent enough time talking about OnlyFans this past year. Yes, the underlying subject matter might be uncomfortable, but this really has revolutionized the creator platform economy, particularly so during the pandemic. But getting around any queasiness, it underpins so many themes that Platformer is about: the role of the state, a possibly decentralized future, censorship, the technical infrastructure of the technology, and the raw economic power of the platforms themselves. Please run with this!