OnlyFans and the Creator Economy
Last week, OnlyFans announced that sexually explicit content will be banned from the platform starting on October 1. As a major player in the creator economy, this decision could cause implications that reverberate.
Fans no more
The background: OnlyFans is a British platform that has become known for adult content. Its popularity has skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as more people turned to the creator economy to earn an income. At the end of 2019, OnlyFans had 120K creators. By the end of 2020, it had 1M.
What happened: Last Thursday, OnlyFans announced that it would ban sexually explicit content from the platform, starting October 1. A company representative explained that this decision was made to:
... comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.
OnlyFans has placed the blame on credit card companies, insinuating that it will face bans on processing payments due to the explicit nature of content on the platform. Back in the spring, MasterCard announced its intent to impose stricter regulations on the companies it works with, purportedly in an effort to prevent illegal adult content on the MasterCard network. Its statement says, in part:
The evolution of our registration programs is critical to ensure that we, as well as those who connect merchants to our network, understand who we are doing business with and what can be expected of their activities.
Banks or gatekeepers? This is not the first time that banks have become involved with policing adult content on the internet. In 2020, The New York Times published an article on alleged underage and un-consenting adult performers being shown in videos on PornHub, causing Visa and MasterCard to swiftly cut ties with the platform. Unable to process payments, PornHub subsequently agreed to remove millions of videos from the platform in response.
Battle royale: The adult entertainment industry has long battled with (notoriously conservative) financial institutions, as the stigma of sex work persists. In 2014, Chase Bank embarked on an account termination spree, closing the accounts of known porn stars and sex workers, and making headlines. PayPal and Square have also frozen the accounts of adult workers, going so far as to ban some individuals from the platforms altogether.
A thin line: There seems to exist a thin line between protection and censorship. Protecting minors and punishing illegal sexual activity are both necessary. On the other side is the goal of protecting the rights of creators. If financial institutions are to continue arbitrating what is acceptable, just, and worthy, we will continue to see situations like these, where an adult entertainment industry blogger was denied a bank account for selling a corset online, and a former escort was banned from processing payments for the sale of her memoir.
A mad dash
Insult to injury: The announcement from OnlyFans brought a ton of uncertainty, in part because the platform initially declined to inform its users of the change. OnlyFans creators learned of the impending ban via media outlets, not from the company itself. In fact, creators who reached out to the company directly received messages outright denying the change:
To date, the company's only public mention of the ban has been on Twitter:
So what's banned? OnlyFans has kept the wording very vague, confusing many creators regarding what will be allowed come October. The platform claims that it will still allow nude photos and videos, and will provide more information on the new policy soon.
The backlash: Many OnlyFans creators feel a deep sense of betrayal from the platform. OnlyFans raked in $2B in 2020, much of it off of the backs of adult entertainers. Many adult content creators felt that OnlyFans was once a safe space, and they are now having it suddenly taken away. Advocacy groups agree. Cam model Mary Moody told The Verge:
When you rip a huge market share out of the adult industry, suddenly they have no way to interact with fans, no way to sell or market their content. So what happens is the privileged few are able to move and adapt, while more marginalized workers, who may have worked in riskier street-based sex work prior to OnlyFans are pushed offline and into the streets.
Mary is also a board member of Adult Industry Laborers & Artists, an advocacy group aimed at protecting the rights of those in the adult entertainment industry.
What this means for creators: The creator economy has exploded in the past year-and-a-half, but it also comes with its cons. One of the major drawbacks involves the issue of ownership. When creators' content is hosted on a platform, they must follow the terms of use of that platform. This sudden change on OnlyFans illustrates how important it is for creators to maintain ownership of their audiences.
This new ban will also have implications for other platforms, as adult content creators migrate away from OnlyFans. Many are moving to Fansly, PocketStars, and other platforms, and are offering special incentives to their audiences to follow them to the new sites.
What do you think of OnlyFans' ban and its impact on the creator economy? Please share below!
As ever with censorship, the issue here is who gets to decide.
If the police were demanding that OnlyFans take down illegal content, that would be one thing. It’s OK when legislation defines what’s allowable and the courts decide whether content infringes that legislation.
But that’s not what’s happening here. It’s not OK when faceless executives at monopolistic financial institutions destroy people’s livelihoods at a whim. Who are these people to decide what content is allowed?
This action by a credit card company is shameful and anti-democratic. I’ve never been a proponent of the utility of cryptocurrencies, but if the established financial institutions continue to bully people like this, we need an alternative.
Agreed, Mark! The fact that financial institutions are determining who is "worthy" of making money online is highly problematic.
I also don't like the way that OF handled the situation. In the end, the creators were screwed by all parties involved.
Yes, you’re right, @jayavery. It’s the usual platform-creator power imbalance: it’s the creators who lose.
Only mistake the creators made is promoting their OnlyFans URL instead of a domain name that they own, that they can just redirect to another platform whenever their current platform betrays them.
I totally agree! I'd recommend that creators always have a way to reach their audiences outside of any specific platform in case they need to migrate them to another at any point.
Ownership is one thing, diversification is another. For us it means a great pump with our recent launch of StreamBee Buzz, which is OnlyFans alternative, but for meaningful conversations.
Creators (streamers in our case) don't want to hustle with platforms, gateways, etc. Instead, they purely focus on content, that's why I don't think they will start using their own self-hosted solutions.
I've worked for a long time in traditional banking and now fintech.
What I can add is that its often not the banks themselves that care about this. Banks are heavily regulated meaning the regulator is almost above the law in a lot of cases. They can force you to stop on boarding customers for instance so banks really listen to what they say.
As a result, banks often get asked to police various activities. E.g. money laundering, security trafficking etc. More importantly how they do this is partially down to them but also the regulator.
They may ask you to stop giving accounts to certain people or to stop banking certain activities. The fact this heavy handed approach hurts innocent people is not always a concern to regulators. They get in trouble when bad cases hit the media not when financial inclusion measures drop by a few percent.
Wow, thanks for the insight! This is great information, and adds another layer to this whole controversy. What are your thoughts on OF walking back on the ban, claiming that they found a way to work with the banks (and regulators)?
It doesn't surprise me. Since the regulators have arbitrary powers there isn't a rule book for this stuff. So it could be OF going hmmm... what would my bank think. The bank going hmmmm what would the regulator think. Thenregulators going hmmm.... what would the politicians think. Somewhere along that chain, there was a change of opinion.
As an example, there was a sex worker case at the fintech I was at. Most people around the table wanted to keep the account from a fairness point of view. But in the end decided against it as the regulator was already roasting us on other topics. So the decision was, we want to have these customers but just not now.
I also think it shouldn't be up to the credit card companies to judge what kind of content a website should carry. Maybe a cryptocurrency-based digital content platform would make a difference. So I added ETH payments to an open source project I wrote about earlier. https://github.com/easychen/not-only-fans
It's important but not easy. And definitely not convenient for the consumers. Until a few years ago, adult performers used to have their own "vip club" websites. Why do you think they failed? Because it's too much friction to sign up for multiple websites, enter your payment info, and then regularly keep checking in for new content.
Onlyfans consolidated content in one place which made discovering, buying and consuming content easy. Even though there are other platforms available, I'm certain creators will see a dip in their revenue due to the overall segregation of content.
Agreed, it's definitely easier said than done! But these platforms can switch things up at anytime, and unfortunately, many creators (not just OF, but other platforms too) may not be in a position to pivot.