Three months ago I wrote a column celebrating independent content creators finally receiving their due as Covid-19 had sent us all scrambling for indoor entertainment options, and it seemed that the cottage content industry was booming (“Rethinking the paid content model in the era of OnlyFans”, May 18). New digital content models were opening up direct channels between audiences and creators of podcasts, vlogs and more.
Sod’s Law, I spoke too soon, because the big news in the digital creators’ space this week is OnlyFans and its about-turn on the matter of X-rated content.
OnlyFans was founded in the UK in 2016 as a platform connecting creators and subscribers, and grew about 10-fold during the pandemic. There are about 2-million creators on OnlyFans, serving 130-million subscribers.
It is a booming business for both the platform, which takes a 20% cut, and individual creators. Though most creators are not getting rich off OnlyFans — rather supplementing their income — some are earning six figures in micropayments direct from fans who can’t get enough of the one-to-many distribution model. B-list actress turned content creator Bella Thorne infamously netted more than $1m in a single week. The biggest earner on the site is model and entrepreneur Blac Chyna (real name Angela Renée White), who reportedly makes $20m a month via the platform.
The site offers much more than nudie pics. It has been actively targeting beauty and makeup content creators recently, and there are many creators peddling their fitness, acting, cooking, non-explicit modelling and more via the platform, but for better or worse it is explicit content that drove the OnlyFans boom.
Makers of explicit content not only immediately saw the potential for this platform but are directly responsible for its meteoric growth. So much so that OnlyFans — whether it likes it or not — is now primarily associated with this type of material. The opening line of a Quartz article on the specifics of the ban, for example, reads: “The porn website OnlyFans announced last week it is pivoting away from porn.” An NBC report on the same matter calls it “a site built on sex”.
A number of creators are now asking if they are being excluded because OnlyFans doesn’t want to go through the administration burden of meeting those elevated compliance standards
OnlyFans has, of course, long known this about itself, and likes to talk about being “inclusive of artists and content creators from all genres”, allowing them to monetise content “while developing authentic relationships with their fan base”. The site emphasises its market-leading engagement metrics and strong pop culture positioning — all of which is built on the back of a reputation for explicit content.
Now explicit content creators say they feel betrayed by the platform, which announced last week that it would be banning pornography from the site as it is courting financing.
The company said on Friday: “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” adding that this evolution is in response to feedback from “banking partners and payout providers.” Nudity will still be allowed, it clarified, but “content containing sexually explicit conduct” will be banned.
A BBC report on the matter links this move even more directly to Mastercard’s decision about adult content sites that use its payment processing system. In 2020 Mastercard and Visa ended their relationship with Pornhub. Mastercard’s new policies require that adult sites have more controls in place to monitor and ban illegal content, especially that including children — which is more than fair. But a number of creators are now asking if they are being excluded because OnlyFans doesn’t want to go through the administration burden of meeting those elevated compliance standards.
An August 19 report by Axios — which predates the moves, but has been updated to reflect the latest news — gives a fascinating rundown of OnlyFans’ finances that shows how the company has struggled to get institutional investors because of the “porn” association, which leaves me wondering if it is not just its aversion to paperwork getting in the way.
It is also worth noting that venture capital and fintech are largely male dominated, and OnlyFans is one of the few platforms on which female creators dominate the top earners’ charts.
Sex workers
Let us hope the financing it can now net will make up for the creators and users it will lose, because the reaction on social media could be neatly summed up as “enraged” at the betrayal.
Yes, the internet has a clear problem with exploitive content such as child pornography and other content made through coercion and trafficking — but one can also make the argument that shutting down direct channels from makers to users is akin to sending empowered sex workers back to a pimp-run market in which they lose all self-determination. And yes, that is a sentence I never thought I would write or read in Business Day.
As one creator told Wired: “This is nothing short of catastrophic to thousands of survival sex workers, the vast majority of whom are black, indigenous, brown, queer, mentally ill, disabled, fat, single parents, undocumented and unhoused ... if this was any other industry, we would report it as a staggering number of people being laid off across the planet.”
Naturally, explicit-content creators are just one segment of the broader indy content industry, but the move has prompted some soul-searching from the cooks, cross-stitchers, cross-fitters and the like, and it has brought an important conversation back to centre stage about content-creation rights, and the model of distribution all creators benefit from, or not.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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