Website Built on Porn to Ban Porn

OnlyFans, a website best known for allowing members to charge for their nudes, appears to be getting out of the very porn business that brought many of its 130 million users to the site. As Bloomberg reported today, the company will prevent users from posting sexually explicit content starting in October. The specifics of this arrangement, however, remain somewhat murky: As a company representative told the outlet, OnlyFans users will still be able to post nudes, as long as they’re consistent with a yet-to-be-announced policy outlining what exactly “sexually explicit” is supposed to mean.

“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and the continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” the company told Bloomberg.

The company also said it had been facing pressure from payment providers over the platform’s distinctly not-safe-for-work user base, which may be only partially true. Through the pandemic, the company’s user base ballooned as sex workers adapted to a contactless reality and many Americans were stuck at home or under-employed. Between March and April of 2020, OnlyFans reported 200,000 new users a day. A year later, it said it hit $2.4 billion of revenue, thanks in large part to the 20 percent cut it took from the money all that porn was generating.

But as every platform must grow, often at the expense of the people who adopted it, OnlyFans has reportedly been looking for investors spooked by such concepts as “nudes” or “nipples.” As Axios reported shortly before today’s announcement, the company has been trying to raise money and run into some difficulty over the whole porn thing, with firms citing the platform’s “reputation” or raising theoreticals about what minors might do online. It remains unclear what OnlyFans, having given up on its most lucrative and interesting market, might be pivoting to or how it plans to proceed once it’s functionally ejected the people who made the business what it is.