text
OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.
The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.
The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company.
“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and the continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” OnlyFans said.
OnlyFans has attracted more than 130 million users by giving online creators a platform to charge their fans for photos and videos. Many of its most-popular creators post nude photos and videos, and it has been praised for giving sex workers a safer place to do their jobs.
But sex work still has a stigma. And OnlyFans is trying to raise money from outside investors at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-to-block-sexually-explicit-videos-starting-in-october
Another blow to sex workers and adult content creators. They have virtually zero labor rights in this country and many of them rely on this for their main source of income.
Edit here is an updated statement from OnlyFans
Effective 1 October, 2021, OnlyFans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually-explicit conduct. In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines. Creators will continue to be allowed to post content containing nudity as long as it is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy. These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers. We will be sharing more details in the coming days, and we will actively support and guide our creators through this change in content guidelines.
https://www.inputmag.com/tech/onlyfans-is-banning-porn-the-very-thing-that-made-it-big
Final edit: It looks all of this does indeed stem from a lot stricter guidelines being imposed by Mastercard, which investors and adult content industry professionals believe will be followed by other large credit institutions. This site wrote a good write up of the new requirements being imposed by MC. https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-mastercard-rules-mean-for-adult-sites-producers
It reads like bad news for a lot of people with their extremely arbitrary use of "sexually-explicit content" which I'm taking as actual porn as opposed to lewd or "art" type photography. What I think is key in most of this is the requirement that every piece of media uploaded needs to be reviewed and approved before its public. This might actually be very unprofitable change for sites like OF but much easier for professional porn sites that basically already do this now and have all records of the performers on file already. That's my guess though but a lot of this is very wordy and things are going to definitely change in some ways for smaller content creators
McDonald's is legit a real estate business, so somehow even that is less far fetched than OnlyFans doing non porn lol
I've heard this, but I don't get it. They aren't flipping real estate -- they're buying and holding, and their revenue comes from the restaurant business. Is the idea that their land values appreciate and it's a boon to their balance sheet or something?
They can essentially block competition more easily if they want but they do rent out spaces to people, McDonalds franchises and other businesses so they're getting passive income by just being extremely rich already. It's more profitable because less labor involved and tax breaks for large landlords
I mean, it's in their financial statements. About 20% of the company's revenue comes from franchisees' rent payments.
I think the idea is they don't want what some people call hard-core porn on their site but that is a bit of an arbitrary thing. I think they want their site to be more artsy or "softcore"
There are some people on there that just post lewds over full on nudes though but it seems like a much smaller userbase
I’d like to see it be more wholesome content, such as taliban fighters riding around in bumper cars with their guns
Feels like the owners of OnlyFans got insanely rich out of the labor and creativity of sex workers and then decided to dump them all off.
ok but are non-sexworkers using it? because if it's not sex work, it's patreon, as far as what I've seen.
Why would they do this? I can't think of a possible reason. No matter how much they try to censor their image as porn site won't go away
Evidently their banking partners asked them to. But it seems wild. What do you think you'll replace 90% of your users with.
I don't know a lot about financial stuff, but is it possible that these investors can make money off a huge loss? Kind of like a short, although I assume this company is not publicly traded.
That's not the investors they are interested in. They are interested in big investments by banks which are not always super ok with some illegal stuff. It's the big investors who are causing the trouble.
lol wut? I thought onlyfans was strictly a pornographic platform?
Investors don't just tank the value of something so profitable for no reason. There's something else to this, I'm just not sure what. Maybe they're planning on going public and want to short the stock or something? Or they make more money off traditional porn sites and don't want to lose that revenue stream? I'm not financially savvy enough to figure out why, but I know banks don't just fuck themselves out of money for no reason.
Yeah I'd imagine it has to do with advertisers or something and how they will further monetize the company like what Tumblr did
AFAIK services like PayPal are often the real reason behind stuff like this, the ancient ghouls in charge of them absolutely despise anything to do with sex
From what I've seen it appears this is from MasterCard threatening to pull away from them because of the recent BBC report on child prostitution and sex trafficking.
I would imagine though that a lot of this is all just the old farts jn these companies who are against all kinds of sex not just that.
See this is the kind of shit that shows how problematic the libidinous left is. Normal people used tumblr for a decade and pretty much nothing has changed since. It's actually still growing, and they can get better deals with advertisers now. But no, with you guys, suddenly one day t*mblr deletes all your favorite cartoon ganguro/himbo/butt sharpie blogs and everyone who doesn't actually use tumblr just starts flipping out and parroting that "tumblr is dying".
I used tumblr before the ban and i use it now, and the site did change a bit (mostly due to artists and their followers leaving i think), but i get that it is still there and much the same - if anything it just seems like the discourse has gotten a little less insane. I'm not saying its dying, what i was referring to was the site being bought for $1.1 BILLION originally and being sold for $3 million just after the ban.
Personally i'm just looking forward to seeing some massive company lose a shit-ton of money (hopefully)
i agree that the site hasn’t change as drastically as outsiders pretend it has but i don’t think its growing, by any measure. it definitely feels like it isn’t absolutely hemorrhaging users anymore but there’s no way that its growing. i just chalked that up to all the people who were going to leave leaving and a core longterm userbase remaining.. do you have statistics on this?
From what I found online it looks like it very slightly grew compared to last year, but it looks more or less stable.
some techbro from techbros'r'us told me "lol look here's proof that tumblr was completely obliterated by the p*rn ban" then I opened the link and something like 28/30 of the metrics were continued stable growth with almost no dip from the announcement or the enactment of the ban.
but that one specific metric, that tons of porn traffic disappeared? that's literally mission accomplished! (even if I technically disagree with the ban).
what, youve never used tumbler dot net to browse :butt: sharpie blogs?
It's because they're on an investment round, and loads of venture capital firms have pathetic rules banning apps built to distribute sexually-explicit content.
Uncritical support to sex workers uniting to consume the flesh of venture capitalists. :mao-shining:
wut
"In other news Youtube is banning all video content in general off it's platform."
Srsly tho: How do they expect to stay in business? lol
If I was a porn site and all of my vendors were telling me that serving my business was illegal because I wasn’t in compliance with a bunch of regulations, I’d release this statement, underfund my moderation team, and then make a big show of how difficult it is to moderate a platform of this size. Effectively look the other way on the majority of content while playing whack a mole with high profile ones that fall outside the new official policy
So like virtually every rule in existence, just a selective enforcement regime to benefit whoever they fancy benefitting and fucking everyone else. Classic.
I made an edit with this link and what you just said is what my conclusion to this was after reading all this bullshit jargon. This sounds like a win to large adult companies and a loss for small ones. There will definitely be much stricter moderation needed and OnlyFans might just be crunching numbers and deciding it won't be profitable enough even if they work out the logistics. It doesn't sound like they'll be switching payment processing or perhaps assume other professors will follow the same new guidelines anyways
They were
probablydefinitely forced into this position by credit card companies. There's been news stories on websites like BBC news about people fooling the age verification on onlyfans, the site being used as a front for prostitution, pimps manipulating the site, etc. That freaks out the credit card companies, once those stories start hitting the mainstream media.Porn sites, like most companies, only view the sex worker as a means to an end. They're just as complicit in sex trafficking and abuse, and when they're finally under threat they decide to tear it all down even the legit sex workers because the comfort of their laborers isn't a priority.
Yeah pretty much. They also always end up being run by the worst types of people. Is it even possible to make an ethical porn website under capitalism?
They're still doing photos etc so eh, it's still gonna be their thing kind of.
Far fewer people care about photo porn compared to full-on vids, no way it'll be enough to keep em' afloat.
I mean I don't really understand how it's a thing in the first place, so I'm not sure it's gonna be enough to drive them out of business or whatever. They'll probably save some server space too by reducing vids.
By the way I just noticed that apparently they're not even banning nude videos, just "sexually explicit", so I'm guessing it's a softcore thing.
I'm pretty sure they're not intentionally gonna destroy themselves by banning like 99% of the content there lol it's probably some "you can't post extreme closeups of you getting railed by 10 people" thing to appease investors.
It's not even gonna be suggestive, look at what they're saying. Nude content will be permitted.
you can expect the reviewers to err on the side of conservative values
Why can you expect the reviewers of a website that is known pretty much only for sexual content and doesn't really have anything else that is new to bring to the market to do that? It's more likely that they'll try to strike a balance between that and what their investors (and app store) want, mostly to keep appearances. I don't see OnlyFans being able to transition to some other type of content any time soon. They may want to do this eventually but they're not there yet, their competition already offers everything they could.
This "striking a balance" means that SWs living off OnlyFans, who are now permanently in the margins of the ToS will always be on the cutting board, ready to be banned at a minute's notice. It's not a viable platform anymore, even if they do not ban literally all their suggestive content.
anti-sex work platforms
I mean, OnlyFans is pretty much a sex work only platform, I'm saying it would be stupid if they banned it so I don't think that's what they are doing at all.
Because it’s happened a hundred times before?
When was the last time a platform which almost exclusively hosts and promotes sexual content just banned it practically overnight? They'll just fail if they do that, I don't think they have a death wish, I think they will try to pivot to somewhat "cleaner" content to go more mainstream. Maybe in the future they want to pivot to SFW content only but it's not gonna happen in two months.
Tumblr, Patreon
Neither was relying primarily on sexual content, Tumblr had plenty of other stuff going on and Patreon was the go to for youtubers.
PornHub
PornHub, much like what OF will probably do, never banned NSFW content (obviously, it's called PORNhub after all...).
All of them have made it significantly more difficult for sex workers and adult artists to make a living or even exist on those platforms
More difficult yes, but there is no way they'll just get rid off basically their only source of growth and revenue in 2 months.
OnlyFans only rose to prominence after Patreon forced sex workers off their platform in the first place.
And this is one more reason why they wouldn't do it, Patreon already fills the niche they could have tried to attack.
Estimates from the owner of graphtreon — a third party website that tracks Patreon user’s growth — said that 40% of patreon’s income came from NSFW pages.
If that’s not ‘relying’ on SW it’s pretty damn close.
Also: you claim that patreon / tumblr didn’t ban 100% of adult content. Maybe not, the the point is the ongoing harassment campaign / demeaning of sex workers.
Also: you claim that patreon / tumblr didn’t ban 100% of adult content.
No, I didn't really say that, I said that they could just do it and still survive or do better, because they already had a lot of other content, unlike OnlyFans which has almost exclusively NSFW. Like, Tumblr had a choice between banning porn or saying goodbye to the app store. The second would hurt them more. In OnlyFans' case, they'd just lose close to all their revenue if they just did that.
The point is the ongoing harassment campaign / demeaning of sex workers.
Yeah, that was tumblr’s reason for banning all NSFW content. To me, the excuses matter very little. There’s always some wedge the capitalist can use to justify their misdeeds. And banning all pornography was a serious misdeed.
In the case of Tumblr it was pretty minor compared to Patreon really...
This isn’t some theoretical thing where we can afford to take a soft stance
It really doesn't matter what stance anyone takes because it's not gonna make any difference. Legislation is a different thing and much more meaningful.
I'm not sure how I am defending OF, I'm saying they're not gonna instantly destroy themselves like that. I'm saying what I think they're gonna do.
Nobody can earn a viable living on suggestive content alone.
Some twitch streamers are doing it, but you have to be really pretty and really lucky I guess
Tumblr is not a porn website lol the vast majority of Tumblr users weren't using it for the porn.
No, they started losing a huge chunk of their userbase because the app was banned from App store due to child porn, which is why they banned porn in the first place. They didn't lose 75% of the userbase because of banning porn, most people on Tumblr weren't there for the porn.
That was the censor’s reason for purging all adult content but do you really believe it? Their only solution was to carpet-nuke all pornography?
Please don’t fall for this “think of the children!” Line they throw out every time it’s time for a sex worker purge.
That was the censor’s reason for purging all adult content but do you really believe it? Their only solution was to carpet-nuke all pornography?
Yes, that was the primary reason they did it because that was the rationale behind the App Store removing their app, which actually did happen. No, I don't believe capitalists are simply conspiring to destroy their business. And there is no real shortage of capitalists willing to make money off of porn either, porn is a multi billion dollar industry. They're not gonna lose a sizable part of their revenue because someone up there has strict morals or whatever, only if it somehow gets them in trouble and makes them lose money. They were already trying to selectively get rid of child porn, they weren't doing very well and then they probably panicked after they were pulled from the app store so they decided hey, fuck this, we're getting rid of it all, which would probably help them get more investors willing to invest too. Maybe not the best idea for them either, but people frame it as if it was some kind of personal grudge against sex workers, it wasn't, it's just the consequence of this sort of stuff being illegal to varying degrees in many places. So the main thing is legislation, not what platforms do, platforms will do what they do and no one will be able to have an effect on them as long as the legislation isn't touched.
My argument is that the NSFW crackdown is based on a societal hatred towards sex workers no matter what tumblr says.
There’s always a pretext for them to something that hurts SWers: human trafficking, the App Store, moral decay. I don’t care to hear the rationale because their ideology and actions constantly make it clear they loathe SWers.
I don’t believe tumblr made an honest effort to remove only the bad stuff from their platform but to me it doesn’t really matter.
frame it as if it was some kind of personal grudge against sex workers, it wasn’t, it’s just the consequence of this sort of stuff being illegal to varying degrees in many places
That’s it! That’s my point! That this stuff is illegal only due to chauvinistic, anti-sex, anti-woman attitudes. And tumblr is taking the role of the police to enforce that societal grudge against vulnerable people. Whether the individuals at tumblr felt spite or sought to maximize profit doesn’t really matter; I look at the damage they do which seems to be at the behest of payment processors. But who tells the payment processors what’s okay?
Yeahhhhh :/ kinda kicked myself for even posting it. But I felt obligation to keep it updated, as this really is a labor and capital problem colliding yet again, with unfavorable outcome likely for labor of course
