Update: After reading my article (and only mine), OnlyFans reversed their decision, and will drop the planned ban.
Disclaimer: If my mom or a future girlfriend finds this article, all my knowledge of OnlyFans comes from reading articles about the site, and none of it comes from first-hand experience.
Today, many people are finding out that OnlyFans provides content other than porn, because soon enough, they will no longer even be doing porn at all.
To which most people responded, “what the fuck?”
Imagine McDonald’s suddenly announced they were no longer grilling burgers, Gibson stopped selling guitars, or Taco Bell stopped selling dog food under the guise that it’s ‘Mexican food’ (I kid, please don’t ban me Taco Bell). How would these companies make money? “Oh Gibson also makes amps, they can just focus on that!” Okay, but that’s not their thing.
OnlyFans has always had a weird relationship with their porn content. On the one hand, doesn’t let you search for explicit content creators and their sponsored posts and advertisements always focus on musicians, people who draw (none of those drawing which are NSFW either). You know, the PG-13 stuff. And yet, their logo looks conspicuously like a porn logo.
According to Bloomberg, the soon-to-be-former amateur porn market trying to raise money with a valuation of $1 billion. A lot of speculation surrounding this deal is that they are getting rid of the porn due to an upcoming IPO. I honestly can’t understand why you would dump what I have to assume is the vast majority of their revenue before an IPO unless they think public disclosure could cause them trouble.
OnlyFans took a 20% cut of $2 billion in sales on their site last year, and although we can’t be sure how much of that is porn, I think it’s safe to say it’s a lot, due to OnlyFans’s earning curve. According to xsrus.com, “the revenue of content creators follows a classic power law distribution”.
According to their research, back in April of 2020, the top 1% of accounts make 33% of all the money and the top 10% of accounts make 73% of all the money. Now, I don’t want to assume things, but I’m gonna guess many of the top earners are porn, which means OnlyFans is just throwing money away.
Porn is such an integral part of the OnlyFans business model that when Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans without posting naked pictures, it caused a whole host of problems on the site including mass requests for refunds. That being said, she is still one of the site’s top earners, bringing in $11 million a month, which is more than $2 million in revenue for the company. Cardi B, the site’s third-highest earner at $9.34 million a month, posts “real life content shit”, adding “NO I WONT BE SHOWING PUSSY, TITTIES AND ASS”. So I guess OnlyFans’s plan is to be a service that focuses on celebrities now, but ones who keep their clothes on?
If OnlyFans decision to cut out explicit content is really part of a plan to IPO, throwing away a huge chunk of your earnings before IPOing is a weird strategy. According to The Daily Beast, the change is taking place because MasterCard’s changing policy. While that sounds plausible, I don’t totally buy it.
Maybe they just hate making money, or maybe there is something else to this whole thing. All I will say is that I won’t be buying into an IPO if they have one.