Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the adult content site OnlyFans has made a decision to ban future content that is adult in nature. Taken on the surface, this seems like a logical step for a company that is trying to appear more mainstream, but after unpacking this story, it appears there’s a lot going on under the surface, and the results may vary and the owls may not be what they seem.
For those who deal with these types of subjects on the surface only, it seems very straight-forward, but if you listen to the responses from those in the industry, the rhetoric ranges from “the sky is falling” to “this doesn’t change anything from the status quo.” However, there are changes coming, and yes, they are going to affect some people more than others. So, exactly how?
Let’s just put it this way: If you’re already a sex worker content creator with a huge following, the change means very little. Most of the traffic for OnlyFans rarely came through the platform itself; people didn’t find content creators by searching the site (the site was never designed to cater to that process). Instead, sex workers who already had a strong following just advertised they were on OnlyFans and then the people who were already interested in their content went there for an easy process to access more of their material. For those types of creators, there are other services available that not only replace OnlyFans, but they were there long before OnlyFans emerged on the scene. So, those content creators will make do and continue to strive as before.
Where this change makes the largest impact is on the newest demographic: Young women who gravitated towards OnlyFans after the emergence of the pandemic. At first, the large swell of creators joining the platform were mostly adult workers who had very little (or no) Internet presence. As their physical, in person business model was drying up due to the fact that men were not as easy to translate into customers while people were dying from Covid-19, much of their “activity” they would normally charge for could now be converted to virtual interactivity that they could then share for monetary rewards. And what they quickly discovered was that because OnlyFans made it possible to build a lucrative following (as the customers weren’t just someone they met on the street who might never return), they now had repeat customers who could access their content at all times without them having to actually physically maintain proximity to their clients in order to provide services and then get paid.
Because this was both lucrative and quick income, it should not surprise anyone that young women who were probably never planning to become sex workers themselves realized that there could be a lot of money to be made if they, too, hung out their shingle in this marketplace. And almost overnight, starting with strippers and cam girls and then leading to moms and repressed librarians, women were actively engaged in selling promiscuous content to horny guys (well, to anyone, but mostly guys).
The one negative that always seemed to be in the background was the stigma of doing sex work, which for naive reasons young woman seemed to believe might never happen. But as their content was on the Internet, and there is no class amongst the people who subscribe to this type of content, they started to become very surprised when their content became widespread, and future aspirations (and that wasn’t sex work) because almost impossible because of the stigma attached to this occupation. Women, with occupations ranging from doctors to school teachers, lost their jobs when their employers found out they were previously sex workers, even though the women would often try to make the argument that selling pictures of themselves naked was not sex work and then disappointed when such protests fell on deaf ears.
There was a very interesting episode involving Kevin Samuels who confronted a group of OnlyFans girls about how they needed to start banking their money soon because the cash cow of OnlyFans was not going to last forever, and those girls treated him like a moron because this Internet celebrity obviously didn’t understand the business world as well as they did. Well, this announcement from OnlyFans just yesterday indicates that he knew exactly what was going to happen, and one can only imagine how panicked these girls must be right now due to such an announcement.
What makes this somewhat tragic is that such an announcement was inevitable. It happened with Paypal, it happened with Tumblr, and it has happened with so many types of business applications that started out by appealing to the sex worker industry just to get their foot in the door before abandoning that demographic and “going legit”. And as tends to happen with most of these companies, that act of going legit will end up being their downfall because they, too, are tainted by the stigma of being a platform for sex, which is why people will avoid it like the plague if they’re not actually attracting the element that made it famous in the first place. Imagine going to an exclusive club because it always had the hottest women and let those women in free (realizing that was going to bring in customers) and then decided “we’re big enough now that we don’t need to do that” and stopped letting attractive women in for free. So they stopped coming. So would their clientele because the reason they go to those clubs is because of the overabundance of attractive women in the first place. And then the business closes.
This is why nightclubs NEVER do that.
So, it will be interesting to see if OnlyFans goes the direction of Myspace as another company takes its place, or if it somehow morphs itself into something sustainable by hosting celebrities and cooking shows. As for the many women who made their future successes contingent on the platform, hopefully they prepared for this future, already were a sex worker to begin with and can compensate by finding incoming from other revenue streams, or bite the bullet and try to re-enter the workplace environment, hoping beyond all prayers that no one ever finds out about their steamy past. In this digital age, the integration of digital technology has become crucial for success in various industries.
All I know is that I won’t be their lifeline. I’m a lot smarter these days than when I was young and stupid.