Instead, they realized that what would happen is that it would instantly go Chapter 7.
They stumbled on the most brazenly stark "get woke go broke", something so primal and binary that there was no ambiguity, no doubt. If you make us do this, we will have to file for bankruptcy.
So, I have a different take. Based on the fact that MC and other processors were starting to push back on the narrative that OnlyFans was pushing. OnlyFans was leaning into this perception that the card processors were the problem for them to continue with their current policies, but there's a ton of holes in that. The problem was ACTUALLY that OnlyFans weren't making as much profit as they'd hoped for the size their platform had grown to.
Key number is: $2bil. That's the amount OnlyFans claimed in overall transaction activity last fiscal year. Math is easy, and at 20% cut, that means OF made 400mil in fees. They pivoted that into a search for venture capital to grow their platform, because 400mil was not commiserate in their minds with the size of the platform they had created.
To secure capital you need several things: promise of growth, and competition among investors looking to get in at the ground floor (their notion of where they are). You create investor competition by soliciting additional investors (more than those initially interested in you). And you do THAT by promising to expand your platform further into the mainstream of users (promising to lessen the image of a being a vulgar sex shop).
OF announced they were soliciting venture capital way back in March or earlier, and they announced these policy changes, I think, in May. The sudden hype over the approaching October deadline was a combination of media rags jumping on the story and playing up the victimization angle "think of the poor whores!" and sensation of another PornHub or Tumblr situation... whatever made sense in the writer's mind in that moment.
OnlyFans, to some credit, were taking a relatively high-road in all of this, announcing austere policies for an indeterminate future, and privately assuring their biggest account holders that the policies wouldn't affect them as much as it seemed. Check out ItsAGundam's coverage of this, he lightly delves into the rumor mill of some insiders who contacted him and others in the media to tell them this was OF blowing smoke and they were privately assuring big accounts to hang tight, because it'd all work out fine in the end. This is supported by the very real problem of crime on the platform that a surprising few articles in the media were written about.
This is probably the biggest red-flag to me. The media weren't going after OF on the basis of child exploitation, sex-crime, human and drug trafficking, bestiality, or the host of other head-spinning examples that had provably happened, been prosecuted, and in some instances, continued. There were also the very light rumors from ex-employees that OF were complicit in the criminal behavior because they didn't want to scare anyone off by "over moderating." If OF was the enemy, truly, they'd have been tarred as evil, corrupt exploitation peddlers, but they weren't by-and-large. Cynically, I think that was being kept as a kind of blackmail if the OF situation went the wrong way in the end. The media picked their darlings, the thots, and if ultimately they lost, THEN they'd come after OF with cannons blazing and ruin whatever was left as a warning to others.
Then you come to a very big one. OF put out a blog post recently that actually named "the problem" as being payment handlers. MasterCard immediately fired back that this was a lie. That was super strange, because MC historically has not shied away from the idea that they are the taste police, but in this instance they straight up denied it and said OF were full of shit. I think this is because, primarily, this WAS a lie. This was OF leaning into the narrative that had emerged to seem as less of a bad guy and more of a victim. Secondly, for the same reason, MC pushed back hard because OF had never been on the wrong side of the media, fundamentally, they weren't a "social ill" they wanted to remedy in the way that blowing up amateur porn producers who were a threat to established porn producers was (what PornHub was really about).
So what is the main outcome? I think OF got their venture capital investment. The investors they found did not have a problem with funding a sex shop, but having competed with other investors (who potentially did and were attracted by the casualization angle OF were selling briefly) their value commit went up (possibly, maybe it didn't, but I think this was the game OF were trying to play). OF gets to (try to) blame an external force (MasterCard) and people who already thought that's what this was will continue to believe that despite whatever MC says. OF gets to play the victorious hero who fought hard for those poor fragile prostitutes and got them a good deal so they could stay, finally.
It was a risky game, that could still go wrong. Especially if someone powerful feels like they got shafted by the chicanery. But I think, it was always just a game.
Fundamentally, yes. There's a host of things I didn't get into that others have said, like the 'regulation' angle that payment processors likely DID push. I think more than one explanation can be true at the same time, and it wasn't something so simple as OF was playing 4-D chess.
But I DO think that OF was playing a game for profit with all of this and the media participated. MC piped up when they were blamed as the primary cause, but they only insisted they weren't trying to make OF abandon thottery. They left it at that. I think because it was true that they were lightly involved to some extent, mainly with the legal CYA angle of getting people on the platform verified and ID'd.
Tangentially, I also think there's much much more to the PornHub story, and it has a lot to do with driving taste in porn away from 'problematic' topics by focusing the ability to produce it in the hands of a few established, controllable studios.
Forcing anonymity out of a platform is always going to be fundamentally disingenuous. It is fear of competition and lack of control that drives this every time. Combatting crime is just an excuse.
How much of this was OF? Hard to say, I'll guess more than 0%, but less than 50%. I think it really was a profit play, mostly.
So how long until they update their terms and start taking a bigger cut off the top. YouTube takes 45%, most cam sites take 50%, even patreon had to up their cut.
Taking 20%, particularly if they start taking investments from venture capital, is not sustainable.
If infrastructure is in place and minimal labor costs are involved, taking any percent, no matter how low, is sustainable.
Think of a bank. What % does a bank take of your money? like 1% on the transaction, right? And it makes money on that tiny percentage.
There's no reason OnlyFans needs to take more than 5%. It advertises itself, it's a meme at this point. So you need a handful of web devs, email tech support, and accountants aaand... That's it. Like a dozen employees. The website runs itself, the content is made by other people, the money is processed via third party, the advertising is free, the customer base is both captive and gullible, the ONLY way to lose money on this is to go woke.
Its strange YT has not embraced adult content. Not porn, but mature content. Stuff that isnt banned, but aged. Im sure YT can actually make a lot more money if they do.
Twitch embraced it with that hot tub crap. Onlyfans show that they make bank off thots and simps.
I expected they might come to some way to add a little more regulation and allow OnlyFans to remain an online brothel. It's probably just something to verify their age or register as a professional whore or whatever.
I think you're taking the wrong lesson here. The lesson is thus:
Sex sells.
They came face to face with the reality of what their company is, and realized that they were deciding whether or not to commit corporate suicide.
Always has been. It’s not the oldest profession for no reason
Yes.
But you have the wrong conception of what that true power is. You envision it as a cabal.
The true power is the lobster brain.
Man want eat and fuck. That's the true power. Stand in its way and be crushed by the weight of billions of lobsters.
Over a long enough period of time, even feminism will be destroyed by it. Oppose nature and you WILL be crushed by the tidal wave of lobsters.
Because they too realized what OnlyFans is, and that what they were asking would result in the company to just, die.
And with it, all the money they get from it, drop to zero.
Like, this was the simplest "if you make us do this, this company will end" case.
No, they wanted OnlyFans to CHANGE.
Instead, they realized that what would happen is that it would instantly go Chapter 7.
They stumbled on the most brazenly stark "get woke go broke", something so primal and binary that there was no ambiguity, no doubt. If you make us do this, we will have to file for bankruptcy.
And so the banks backed down.
So, I have a different take. Based on the fact that MC and other processors were starting to push back on the narrative that OnlyFans was pushing. OnlyFans was leaning into this perception that the card processors were the problem for them to continue with their current policies, but there's a ton of holes in that. The problem was ACTUALLY that OnlyFans weren't making as much profit as they'd hoped for the size their platform had grown to.
Key number is: $2bil. That's the amount OnlyFans claimed in overall transaction activity last fiscal year. Math is easy, and at 20% cut, that means OF made 400mil in fees. They pivoted that into a search for venture capital to grow their platform, because 400mil was not commiserate in their minds with the size of the platform they had created.
To secure capital you need several things: promise of growth, and competition among investors looking to get in at the ground floor (their notion of where they are). You create investor competition by soliciting additional investors (more than those initially interested in you). And you do THAT by promising to expand your platform further into the mainstream of users (promising to lessen the image of a being a vulgar sex shop).
OF announced they were soliciting venture capital way back in March or earlier, and they announced these policy changes, I think, in May. The sudden hype over the approaching October deadline was a combination of media rags jumping on the story and playing up the victimization angle "think of the poor whores!" and sensation of another PornHub or Tumblr situation... whatever made sense in the writer's mind in that moment.
OnlyFans, to some credit, were taking a relatively high-road in all of this, announcing austere policies for an indeterminate future, and privately assuring their biggest account holders that the policies wouldn't affect them as much as it seemed. Check out ItsAGundam's coverage of this, he lightly delves into the rumor mill of some insiders who contacted him and others in the media to tell them this was OF blowing smoke and they were privately assuring big accounts to hang tight, because it'd all work out fine in the end. This is supported by the very real problem of crime on the platform that a surprising few articles in the media were written about.
This is probably the biggest red-flag to me. The media weren't going after OF on the basis of child exploitation, sex-crime, human and drug trafficking, bestiality, or the host of other head-spinning examples that had provably happened, been prosecuted, and in some instances, continued. There were also the very light rumors from ex-employees that OF were complicit in the criminal behavior because they didn't want to scare anyone off by "over moderating." If OF was the enemy, truly, they'd have been tarred as evil, corrupt exploitation peddlers, but they weren't by-and-large. Cynically, I think that was being kept as a kind of blackmail if the OF situation went the wrong way in the end. The media picked their darlings, the thots, and if ultimately they lost, THEN they'd come after OF with cannons blazing and ruin whatever was left as a warning to others.
Then you come to a very big one. OF put out a blog post recently that actually named "the problem" as being payment handlers. MasterCard immediately fired back that this was a lie. That was super strange, because MC historically has not shied away from the idea that they are the taste police, but in this instance they straight up denied it and said OF were full of shit. I think this is because, primarily, this WAS a lie. This was OF leaning into the narrative that had emerged to seem as less of a bad guy and more of a victim. Secondly, for the same reason, MC pushed back hard because OF had never been on the wrong side of the media, fundamentally, they weren't a "social ill" they wanted to remedy in the way that blowing up amateur porn producers who were a threat to established porn producers was (what PornHub was really about).
So what is the main outcome? I think OF got their venture capital investment. The investors they found did not have a problem with funding a sex shop, but having competed with other investors (who potentially did and were attracted by the casualization angle OF were selling briefly) their value commit went up (possibly, maybe it didn't, but I think this was the game OF were trying to play). OF gets to (try to) blame an external force (MasterCard) and people who already thought that's what this was will continue to believe that despite whatever MC says. OF gets to play the victorious hero who fought hard for those poor fragile prostitutes and got them a good deal so they could stay, finally.
It was a risky game, that could still go wrong. Especially if someone powerful feels like they got shafted by the chicanery. But I think, it was always just a game.
Fundamentally, yes. There's a host of things I didn't get into that others have said, like the 'regulation' angle that payment processors likely DID push. I think more than one explanation can be true at the same time, and it wasn't something so simple as OF was playing 4-D chess.
But I DO think that OF was playing a game for profit with all of this and the media participated. MC piped up when they were blamed as the primary cause, but they only insisted they weren't trying to make OF abandon thottery. They left it at that. I think because it was true that they were lightly involved to some extent, mainly with the legal CYA angle of getting people on the platform verified and ID'd.
Tangentially, I also think there's much much more to the PornHub story, and it has a lot to do with driving taste in porn away from 'problematic' topics by focusing the ability to produce it in the hands of a few established, controllable studios.
Forcing anonymity out of a platform is always going to be fundamentally disingenuous. It is fear of competition and lack of control that drives this every time. Combatting crime is just an excuse.
How much of this was OF? Hard to say, I'll guess more than 0%, but less than 50%. I think it really was a profit play, mostly.
So how long until they update their terms and start taking a bigger cut off the top. YouTube takes 45%, most cam sites take 50%, even patreon had to up their cut.
Taking 20%, particularly if they start taking investments from venture capital, is not sustainable.
If infrastructure is in place and minimal labor costs are involved, taking any percent, no matter how low, is sustainable.
Think of a bank. What % does a bank take of your money? like 1% on the transaction, right? And it makes money on that tiny percentage.
There's no reason OnlyFans needs to take more than 5%. It advertises itself, it's a meme at this point. So you need a handful of web devs, email tech support, and accountants aaand... That's it. Like a dozen employees. The website runs itself, the content is made by other people, the money is processed via third party, the advertising is free, the customer base is both captive and gullible, the ONLY way to lose money on this is to go woke.
Its strange YT has not embraced adult content. Not porn, but mature content. Stuff that isnt banned, but aged. Im sure YT can actually make a lot more money if they do.
Twitch embraced it with that hot tub crap. Onlyfans show that they make bank off thots and simps.
YT seems to be lame about it.
YT got plenty of simps, whatcha talkin bout?
Vtubers be makin bank.
They are quite vanilla compared to onlyfans or hottubbing.
Looks like they've been forced into the same position as Pornhub.
I expected they might come to some way to add a little more regulation and allow OnlyFans to remain an online brothel. It's probably just something to verify their age or register as a professional whore or whatever.
New conspiracy theory: TheImpossible1 is right too often. Clearly, he's orchestrating these events.
On the one hand, the claim seems far-fetched.
On the other hand, TheImpossible1 is always right... Hmmm...
If you're Bill Gates, do you still have that trenchcoat and shotgun from that ad for Windows 95?