I wouldn’t bet on it.
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That’s the literal billion-dollar question.
If 21st-century capitalism worked the way it pretends to (“just work hard and sell your wares and it all adds up!”), then a business that had lots of revenue would be in good shape and not need massive loans. But that’s not how you get rich. The game is to build up the general idea of a business, then sell that idea for a billion dollars, and abandon the “real” business (if any) to melt into air.
Do investors know that OnlyFans gets all its revenue from sex? Sure! But they don’t care whether it will (or even can) turn a profit. All that matters is whether it can support a fantasy of future profits, according to the consensus of the investor class. It’s hard to overstate how much the engine of the present economy is just Ponzi schemes defrauding each other in a big circle.
By banning sex work, OnlyFans gets to cross off various items from the “risks” section of its IPO prospectus, while still saying “we have 3 zillion users!!1”, and why would investors bother digging any deeper.
It’s an abomination that those companies can wield the power they do without any accountability, yeah. I do wonder whether it has anything to do with “morals” though, or if it is because sex-related transactions have an unusually high rate of charge disputes. As a rule, landlords don’t give a shit what you do, unless you keep calling them and making them do actual work.
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HSBC was fine widening the teller windows in some of its Mexican branches so it could accept the volume of drug money being deposited, but it would have a fit it it were to be linked with consensual people talking dirty.
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exactly. Also, at the same time, corporate media is becoming raunchier; OF had long banned BDSM, blood play, knives, etc., stuff that is all par for the course in an HBO sex scene. The banks and investors are not going to call HBO over this.
So what we’re seeing is a colonization of sexual free speech by those who have the money and resources to defend it: corporations, with all the estrangement, de-personalization, wage slavery this goes along with; while the independently, personally, non-institutionally, and much more creatively produced stuff can’t defend itself and it de-listed and marginalized.
This is part of a much wider corporate effort to take over and control content for the parts of the internet it doesn’t 100% control yet.
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Yeah, I’m pretty confident it’s a literal cash grab. The person who owns a 75% stake in it is a Ukrainian who apparently also owns MyFreeCams. Now he wants to cash in on Onlyfans growth, but he can’t because it’s “porn” and traditional investors are clutching their pearls at (GASP) “naked women doing sexy time things!” So they’ve been trying to pivot to SFW stuff and I guess they think they’ve gotten far enough along there they can make the jump, sell the site, and cash in.
Meanwhile, on the other side, I expect investors eager to take on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter think using an established product like Onlyfans will get them most of the way there. They’re following the Yahoo playbook: buy something that’s worth something (Tumblr, Flickr), and fail to take advantage of it as it slowly (or rapidly I think in this case) declines in value.
EDIT: in response to Orenwolf’s comment, I will point out that I HAVE visited the site. I don’t maintain an account, though, because (as I recall) they require credit card info even if a person is providing free content. I don’t support those types of demands because I don’t like storing my credit card info on lots of sites. It’s too likely one of them will be hacked, so my policy is none of them get it (except Amazon, unfortunately, though I shop there much less these days).
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I was not going to comment for this reason. I cannot judge a site that I have not visited. And yet I feel in my gut that if all the other happy mutants are correct in what they write about the site, it does feel kind of shitty to cut off what seems to be one of the few safe ways for sex workers to actually interact with customers.
But again, I never looked at the site, I didn’t even know it existed before I saw this BBS thread.
All a lot of words to say I don’t know enough to have an opinion about this. Only that it has a whiff of prudery about it more than legitimate business concerns.
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So much this. IMHO it is a result of the high price of stocks relative to dividends. The price is so high that there is NO expectation that future dividends will justify current prices. That puts a very high emphasis on “growth stocks.”
You know, once the sex is off the site, their only real remaining asset is the user records. I wonder how much they will get for details of peoples embarrassing sexual interests.
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Yeah, that was a really valid point he made and I’m sorry I missed it until you replied. We are all human, and there’s no shame in enjoying someone else’s expression of their sexuality and enjoyment of sex. Providing sex workers safe spaces and normalizing sex as a quality that’s worthy of promotion is a great thing. While I don’t keep an account there, I have visited and thought they had a nice interface and it was a great idea.
I just don’t like when sites require that they have a right to hold onto your credit card info merely to make an account. I established an Amazon account twenty years ago, but other than their requirements, I don’t sign up for any sites that mandate credit card info as a price of entry, even if all you’re doing is viewing free content.
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While I get your point, none of those details are “embarrassing.” Society wants to THINK they are embarrassing, and we all buy into that lie. But yes, they unfortunately can be weaponized against creators, especially marginalized people. There’s already been one high-profile instance of a woman’s children being kicked out of her Christian private school because a neighbor became aware of her Onlyfans account and reported her to the school board. Why? Probably just pure jealousy that her husband was the one who found it and was watching (seriously).
However, I don’t think that’s the business model here. Instead, it’s to convert the #16 visited site in the world into another normal social media platform. That’s usually what dipshit investors are thinking of, and they almost always fail for a variety of reasons (some because they’re terrible at understanding what makes this stuff work; some because the already existing big players have a lock down on the markets they are trying to nibble at the edges of and they won’t get the traction they think they can).
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Thread arguing that credit card company policies are being driven by Evangelical groups that want to shut down the entire sex industry and use trafficking and child porn concerns as steps towards that goal.
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Ah, well, that does change the narrative a lot. The moral minority is once again rearing its ugly, bigoted, biased, homophobic, anti-sex, antisemitic head.
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I wasn’t thinking of the content creators but of the customers. Simply because that is a bigger batch of people. And yes, for many those details are embarrassing. If you’re trying to find a way to blackmail people, it doesn’t matter what you find embarrassing, or what you think should be embarrassing. What matters how THEY feel about the information being revealed. Remember Prenda Law? prenda law | Boing Boing
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As a music person, I’ve known for years that investing time, energy, and money into any online platform is a total waste. You build up an audience and a methodology, and then the platform suddenly changes how it works and you lose all of that.
The only way to win is to not play the game unfortunately.
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Good assessment. Too many companies no long have the long term goal of being a successful company, but one that is successful enough to bilk the money out of and dump, or build up enough to sell out to someone (who may or may not keep it around - sometimes it is just to get rid of competition.)
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My point was that society demands we be embarrassed about it. Demands we hide our sexual interests in a closet. Demands that we think of it as “immoral.” We all buy into a bullshit lie, and then conservative voices weaponize that lie, but yep… it’s the lie we live right now. What I think we should believe isn’t what’s going to happen any time soon for the vast majority of people.
And you’re right, I should have remembered it’s more than just the creators at stake here. Good reminder (but again, if folks wouldn’t live the lie, they couldn’t be blackmailed; it’s like when I got a security clearance, I told the FBI EVERYTHING about my life; you don’t get dinged for what you’ve done, you get dinged for the lie).
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This is untrue. I’ve definitely seen cases of people denied clearances for being a furry, for example, despite the fact that they were open about it. They also used to regularly deny clearances to gay and especially transgender people. Also, you can’t even get past the paperwork if you admit to any illegal drug use other than cannabis.
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I’m 100% sure the market will adapt perfectly to these people’s blunder. All those creators will be back up an running in no time and the customers will take their money away from only fans and give it to the new provider and the creators.
Well as the half dozen people who have tried to create a stable “free speech” social media platform, it isn’t quite that easy. Sure something will fill the void. It is also possible there is already a similar platform out there, just less popular.
In the meantime, people who were relying on the consistent income are going to be hurting 
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That certainly doesn’t accord with my experience. I can’t speak to the furry thing since I’m not, but I did admit to things far worse than a little dope smoking and I got my clearance, so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯ The criminal record, jail time, and drug use alone you’d think would have knocked me out, but again… they said “we don’t care what you did in the past as long as it wasn’t a federal crime and you’re honest about it.”
Oh yeah, I was brutally honest (always good to remind myself I’ve not led a sparkling pure life, too).
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