I’m so heated. This is so stupid and hypocritical and disrespectful.
OnlyFans is banning porn, the company announced today. It’s a surprise move meant to protect its partnerships with banks and payment providers. The platform will still allow creators to post nude photos and videos, but not any “sexually explicit conduct.” The change goes into effect starting in October.
The decision comes as the London-based company has reportedly been struggling to raise new funding, because investors are either cautious that it might be hosting content containing minors, or because they’re contractually prohibited from investing in adult content. But being a major platform for adult creators, OnlyFans risks alienating the very users who made it big in the first place.
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Let’s rewind for a second.
David Karp founded micro-blogging platform tumblr in 2007. From 2007 to 2013, the platform exploded. It was a little bit Twitter and a little bit Instagram and a little bit LiveJournal, and the combination worked for a wide variety of users, from image-based creators to long-form writers. It made a large range of content easily shareable and searchable, and it was one of the big social platforms you would use to connect with others or to push your own voice out to the masses.
(And make friends! I just met one of my old tumblr followers at the beach this weekend after he recognized my roommate — hey Turner! xoxo)
In 2013, it was such a prized asset in the tech world, Yahoo! bought the company for $1.1 billion. And then everything changed.
Part of tumblr’s skyrocketing success was due to its unofficial home for creators of adult content. It wasn’t just filming yourself for X-tube or writing a story for Nifty, because the social component meant you could more easily interact with the people who enjoyed your content. Users had the freedom to create along with the ability to connect. It was a safe(r) space for NSFW fare aimed at and created by communities marginalized by mainstream porn.
Neither tumblr nor Yahoo! wanted to admit that a large part of the success of the platform was dependent upon adult content, so Yahoo! was not prepared to find a way to keep those creators. They wanted to grow the platform even more and push it further in a mainstream direction, and you cannot do that while hosting porn. There’s no PornHub download in the AppStore. You can’t show your pubes in your Grindr photo because it’s a mainstream app, and Google & Apple make the rules for censorship. Apple decides nudity is a no-no, so tumblr can’t have nudity on its platform. It’s that simple. Tumblr banned adult content, and a third of its users disappeared immediately. In 2019, just six years after the porn ban, this platform that had just sold for $1.1 billion at the beginning of the decade was picked up by WordPress for three milliondollars.
So, this news from OnlyFans is only surprising in the sense that we already saw this happen to tumblr, so does OnlyFans think they will be different? This embarrassingly swift fall from grace happened to a platform whose brand identity was closer to Instagram than XHamster, and yet they completely tanked without porn. OnlyFans as a site is amateur porn. That’s why we know about it! That’s how it makes cameos in pop songs and stand-up comedy routines. For all the porn that popped up on tumblr, it was still seen as a micro-blogging platform that happened to have adult content as well. Most people have no idea that OnlyFans is ever anything other than porn. That is their brand identity, so how do they expect to survive without adult content?
But I don’t care about businesses making bad decisions that will destroy their company. I could not care less about millionaires losing money. I’m upset because sex workers are once again being shit on by people who pretend adult content is dirty or sex is taboo or porn stars are less than. The vast majority of us are sitting here because our parents wanted to have sex and did so. Sex is the reason OnlyFans is even in a position to court investors and banks to give them more money, but they want respectable money now, so to hell with the sex workers who built the visibility of the platform in the first place. Everybody loves porn until it’s time to respect the people who made it.
All of the men involved with kicking porn off OnlyFans are hypocrites. Because we know they jack off. And we know they use porn to do it. But porn is still taboo because nobody wants to say they masturbate. We all masturbate. The fact that OnlyFans is so popular is evidence of that, so why is it so shameful to be associated with a company that facilitates arousal?
It’s so ridiculous and I can’t wait for OnlyFans to crash and burn as quickly as possible. Let me go find someplace else where I can tip the hotties for their good works. We are still in a pandemic. If you are getting railed on camera in the midst of Delta for my benefit, you deserve a couple of dollars at least.
EDIT:
I just read an article about the history of OnlyFans and I think it’s important to highlight that, unlike tumblr, OnlyFans was created specifically for sex workers. Timothy Stokely already had two adult oriented websites on his resume before he started OnlyFans. He saw Instagram users promoting their adult content which they’d then have to sell person to person. Stokely knew there was money to be made by creating a place where those creators could post their stuff instead of selling nudes in the DMs, and OnlyFans was born.
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