With traditional adult entertainment, creators are aware of the social ramifications (e.g., social stigma, familial ostracism, difficulty dealing with the future, and so on), and there is a decent theoretical economic framework to measure that.
I am not sure if there's the same this new army of "civilians" joining OF, let alone the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health.
A few decades ago, there weren't that many "productions", performers were much fewer and some porn performers name were known by anyone, regardless if you had seen porn with them staring or not. A person getting out of the business and trying to make a new career would have a high chance of meeting people, especially men, in real life who might have seen at least one movie.
Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
This is dangerously wrong coming at least a decade after there are entire communities devoted to unmasking performers’ real identities and multiple reverse image search tools exist as apparent businesses. That used to be a human-driven practice - I first heard about it coverage of the Chinese internet mobs from the perspective of victims of misidentification - but like everything else it’s reportedly adopting AI. Here’s a story which got a bit of discussion a few years back:
https://thenextweb.com/news/creepy-programmer-builds-ai-algo...
One of the big things to remember is that these systems don’t need to be perfect, or even close, to cause harm. Even if they were only 10% accurate, that’s still a lot of people living with the question of whether the person they just met knows or whether today is the day some nut sent those links to HR. You can’t rely on getting lost in the crowd any more.
Your model of "social ramifications" seems to assume no one ever talks to anyone else, which is dead wrong. So to see problems, the only thing that needs to happen is one person needs to see their porn out of maybe the 1000 people who could recognize the performer IRL, then a rumor starts and a significant fraction of the 1000 (and more people besides) find out. No fame required.
Then the problem can balloon if another person out of that 1000 is angry with the performer, and decides to dox them by creating a website or posting that explicitly outs them to anyone who searches their name on Google.
Then, on top of that, there's all the facial recognition tech that's floating around, which is basically a "go strait to jail, to not pass go" thing.
I think the odds of getting recognized were a bit lower for me being a male, my peak live viewership was a little over 1k viewers. A video of me also got reposted and featured on PornHub gay and was able to accumulate ~100k views before I was able to get it taken down. There are still plenty of videos around that I wasn't able to get taken down but the big sites like PornHub respect DMCA takedown requests.
Regarding getting recognized, I think you are somewhat right but it likely still happens. I had 2 people recognize me in person, only 1 found my real name because they recognized me at my college graduation. Nothing came of it besides them trying to add me on FaceBook. I think for girls they would be more likely to get recognized if they are successful because they get a lot more viewers.
I was lucky that nobody that did recognize me posted anywhere about what my real name is since that would be a way to find the videos of me when people search my real name. I think that is probably the biggest risk with performing is that if that association happens, it would probably be hard to wipe that association from the internet. One way out of it for women though is that they could take their spouses last name when they get married, their new name wouldn't be associated with the old porn name.
I have told people in my life about that past job. It had no impact on any of those relationships and never really came up again. So if it did come up again, I don't think it would have much impact on my life. In my mind, sex work is real work and those who do it should not be shamed for doing it.
I have no comment on the morals and ethics but as far as modern technology goes; most if not all of OnlyFans finds its way to darkweb | pirate | hoarder megasites where there's always a few because-we-can obsessed techlords training facial recognition, gait recognition, and seeding AI generated VR porn engines, etc.
We can be certain that any woman with an OnlyFans portfolio will face that being dragged up later in their life if they are at all slightly public.
They do have the modern available hand wave explaination of "deepfake by weird ex" that becomes more and more believable each passing day.
also most of the camgirls i know in real life block access to people who live in the same country as they (and i) do; that greatly reduces the chance of awkward dialogues with long-distant uncles at the next family reunion
Is it such a big problem nowadays as it used to be? My impression is that society in general, and younger people in particular, have become more tolerant of such things; at least in Northern Europe.
I’m an old married guy, but I can’t imagine dating and then finding out that the person you were involved with was doing that type of thing. In a friend group I wouldn’t even blink.
Based on the conversations I see, this seems to be a common experience.
I think you're just projecting.
The idea that someone shouldn't be hired for a job because they have/had an OF is puritanism plain and simple.
I expect that fewer people actually care about the "morality" and simply want to use morals as a weapon against women in the workplace.
As a hiring manager, if anything I'd want to consider sex performers as a green flag in a job history. Speaks to resourcefulness, social skills, courage and self confidence.
It adds risk that another hire may not have.
This is why in general it is frowned upon by "certain members of society" as you call them.
Some forms are a lot more taxing on both mental and physical health (plus STD risk). OF doesn't have this same level of risk but people mentally lump it all together
The morals are there for a reason, they just lack nuance
Japan's actually got the least-worst birthrates among Far East, and everyone knows what it's best known for on the Internet.
I don't know why you say this, as it is laughably untrue. The porn industry has ALWAYS filled itself with very very young women who were assured (by liars) their family and friends and coworkers wouldn't see it, promised they wouldn't have to do certain things that they then get pressured and bullied into doing, and giving the women zero control over the produced media, how it is represented, how THEY are represented, and how it is portrayed to the audience.
There's an immense amount of regret and "I didn't know" in the industry.
I am reminded of the study done on the damaged goods hypothesis, which gave a negative on that hypothesis. Not only did porn actresses not have higher rate of childhood sexual abuse, but they rated higher than the average in terms of self-esteem, positive feelings, and social support. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23167939/)
Why though? It is an interesting issue when you look closer. For an individual, it's more obvious - I wouldn't like to be with a prostitute because of possible hidden diseases and lack of trust - but there is no way of telling how many sexual contacts my new partner had, whether paid for or not.
But I wouldn't have any problem working with an ex-pro in the same company or team, they would be just a colleague like all the rest, and I can't imagine any adult making any immature comments about the past of any colleagues on my team.
How is that 'fine'?
I would like to see a future where someone doing sex work to make ends meet (or even as a freely chosen profession!) is not ostracised for it. Sex is part of society whether you want it or not, and so is paying for sexual acts.
Somehow it's mainly the ones who sells their body and not the ones who buy them who get punished.
Buying is more often voluntarily than selling.
A large amount of those people are very young, at an age where you don't really pick your options solely on their super long term consequences.
Most people are going to be "stupid" in their early adulthood, failing and adjusting is a big part of it. Unfortunately, some of those decisions will stick more than others and sex work is very sticky (zing).
No, if you sell sex, lots of societies will punish you. Selling or renting your body otherwise -- which a very large share of jobs involve just as much as sex work does -- is otherwise lauded.
> Thats fine, societies have all sorts of norms we all need to learn.
Lots of norms that societies have or historically have had would be better eliminated. That something is an existing norm isn't an argument in favor of it being a norm.
> It’s just as easy to imagine demand for the “real thing” going down due to the emergence of more substitutes as it is to imagine the premium for parasocial authenticity going up. And yet only Generative AI “creators” will truly do whatever “you” want and only for you. And unlike real ones, they speak in every language and are available at any time (and eventually, in immersive 3D).
Disagree. When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. Real content will fetch a premium
There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. A better way to look at it is there are 4 million humans out there trying every permutation to crack success, and ~400k actually do it.
Unless you have a sufficiently advanced AI agent that is both varying it's content and it's marketing strategy to the tune of maybe ~1000 different iterations it's unlikely we will see a version of OnlyFans that exists that is majority AI generated.
The "parasocial ai girlfriend" sounds like a flawed premise aswell. OF girls are not therapists - Cardi B, Bhad Bhabie, and others aren't raking in millions because they are good girlfriends (although that is part of the upsell). Social status plays a part in the most successful girls, people seem to subscribe because the creator is popular, especially if she's already built a platform elsewhere.
In short, social status does not have an AI substitute.
That observation has echoes of the music industry - another extremely top-heavy creator business. There are formulaic ways to make "good enough" and "catchy enough" songs, but the window for "X enough" keeps shifting. Cranking out grunge won't be sustainable in the age of K-pop.
But the massive runaway hits have been predominantly outliers for their age. They have veered far enough from the mainstream to be interesting in new ways, different enough, and surprising enough to break through.
But to predict in advance what kinds of outliers will win the lottery? Largely random, indeed.
I think that strongly depends on what you call "the creator economy". For example, on YT it's really mostly skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw
Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
* Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric.
* Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion.
* Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie.
* Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption.
I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company.
Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.
It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t
Is there any hard evidence this is true beyond a tiny deluded fraction of the userbase?
Aren't 99% of users just straightforwardly transactional, trading money for access to photos and videos, just like subscribing to a newspaper?
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-c...
I will also not be surprised at all when the inevitable scandal breaks where some popular OF creator was ousted as being AI generated instead of being "real".
There are Instagram influences that are on the platform /today/ that are immensely popular, and they are completely AI generated. Some of their followers even know this, yet they don't really care.
Unlike something like professional wrestling (that is make believe real content), the AI equivalent to only fans seems like it will be trivial to make.
And as the article pointed out, part of why onlyfans exploded in popularity is that other sources of free porn dried up, so it shows there is a substitution aspect where if something better / cheaper comes along, people will switch to it.
One other response mentions social status.
I will contribute another: personal human interaction with someone that seems both "out of your league" AND "no-need-to-get-away-from-the-computer" available. That configuration has significant value (as real content from a real human) for enough of these fans, enough of which recognize this and pay well for it - to make it worth the performer's time. And still very far from "generative AI".
is it possible to write a non-seminal article about onlyfans, though?
I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life is that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it.
It's gotten to the point where I don't visit porn sites any more because the locally generated material is better than what I can find there, and these are just the first sparks of gen AI porn.
Gen AI porn will make the issue of online pornography seem laughable when it drops in requirements so you can run the state of the art models in prosumer hardware.
What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world?
realize it's a torus and wander happily in circles
I have no idea what this sentence means
I think it says something quite dark about our society as a whole that we have basically commoditised distress and are encouraging some people often themselves in dire circumstances to prey on others to the benefits of the middle men. I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands.
I think you should step back and look at it with a bit of distance. Is the content they're paying for really the same as you think is available for free, and do they even get it under the same conditions, in morality and circumstance.
Not knowing your life, it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.
> commoditised distress [...] often in dire situations
The first step to alleviate these specific situations could be to stop marginalizing this kind of content and give them a regular professional status, instead of systematicly pigeon hole it.
The analogy holds. Most people don't pay concert tickets for the music itself. It's the experience, the crowd, the physical presence of the artists, etc.
Wow, What a great analogy. That really is almost the same except not with music but sexual attraction.
> the content they're paying for really the same as you think is available for free,
I dislike arguments made in this vein, it's sortof a way to intellectually dismiss someone's point without addressing it.
I share the grandparent poster's concern. Parasocial relationships feed us in a certain way, but do not nourish.
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have OnlyFans than pimps. But that's not the point.
It's a brand, they like it, they want to be reminded of it and show their love of it off. It creates an "in group" which is socially valuable. Streamers are nothing special in that regard.
Sounds like credit card fraud to me. Bots using stolen cards to scrape OF content. Also easily verifies that the number works before attempting a pricier purchase.
I have a friend who produces a few successful OF models and makes about 5-10x a good SF tech salary. He has a whole army of sexters who impersonate models and DM with fans. Vast majority of his income comes not from subscriptions, but from content sold in these DMs, content which is presented as "exclusive" to the buyer.
To my mind the bigger issue is how much of it is a total scam. OF models offshoring their DM responses so their clients think they’re having conversations with the model when it’s actually some dude half the world away. Or using AI for the same, which I’m sure is increasing exponentially.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when AI is able to generate on demand video/photo and chat that’s realistic enough to satisfy an online client. If people are specifically told it’s AI will they be content with that? Or will they still want an actual real human? We're not exactly rational creatures at the best of times so it’ll be fascinating to see. We’ll have gone from the phone sex lines of yore, where you are interacting with a real human even though they’re definitely not the human you’re imagining in your head, to an AI video chat where you’re seeing exactly what you want but there’s nothing behind it.
If you go back and watch <= 90s movies and tv (PG-13!), it's amazing how pervasive and frank sexuality there is.^
In contrast to current mores that mandate sexy, but never actually talking about sex.
The deterioration of more honest discourse in mass media about realistic (read: fumbling, awkward, funny, vulnerable, spiritual) physical sexuality has left young folks ill prepared to enjoy that side of life.
^ Exhibit A: Hercules the Legendary Journeys (1994, produced by Sam Raimi!) S01E02, which would make most kids today cringe, despite just being scantily-clad depictions of consensual sexual desire and bawdy banter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgz7burclcI
Do you have a source for that angrily defended "fully rational reinterpretation"?
I suspect the word for what's going on is rationalization not "fully rational reinterpretation" (e.g. "This is a thing we're doing, therefore it's good because we do it. Let's reevaluate everything else to achieve that result.").
Anyway, a lot of people who have never used the site before think it's mostly what you said. It's not. The parasocial stuff is tiny unless you're doing specific kinks for people.
What I tell most people not familiar with the industry is that it's usually more like seeing someone in real life (NOT a porn star, celeb, etc, amateurs only) that you've got a crush on naked for only $10/mo. It has the amateur thing a lot of people love. Another reddit comment is always "Why pay when porn is free?" Have you never had a crush on someone? And amateur porn is probably the biggest "kink" I feel weird even calling it a kink, I'm practically on the "who doesnt like amateur porn??" end.
That's 90% of the customers. Lots of people who think a youtuber or instagram or whatever not professionally showing themselves off is just hot and want to see them naked.
I've never spoken to a single customer. I'm a straight man and most of mine are men and I have no interest or desperation for money to do para/kink stuff.
I really don't get why so many people think onlyfans is about messaging talent back and forth. It's kind of annoying to constantly read because it always comes from non-OF users who have this weird morality/ethics problem with sex work. It makes no sense if you know anything about porn. Most people jack off in silence and close their laptop and there aren't thousands of onlyfans models with media managers. Most are 18-25yo women who work corporate jobs or bartenders and have their own life to live. They treat it like youtube, upload content a few times a week and never look at messages.
Don't kink shame, stop with the "I don't know why anyone uses this instead of that, you're a loser if you pay for porn" thing. You like what you like, other people like what they like.
Vices like gambling, obscenity, prostitution, drugs, etc are banned or heavily controlled societies over because they have significant negative cultural effects. “Why do YOU care what other people do in their private lives?” was always a stupid justification: if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me.
Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident speaking about), we are still bound by puritanical values that were imposed as control mechanisms but managed to sneak their way into a set of cultural norms as a moral code despite their actual value to us not being evaluated and actively selected.
Do they? Citation needed. So far it seems that marijuana consumption leads to far less violence than alcohol, and proliferation of porn leads to much lower rates of sexual violence.
> if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me
Then choose and manage your own community, but don't push this view on the whole country. Dozens of millions of people (I don't know what country do you live in, so not sure about the population) are not a "community" that you can put under the same norms. If you think that porn is bad, it's your right to do so, and to find likeminded people to build a community that shares these values. But why would you want to force it on other people?
The free stuff isn't always as good, especially if you want something of a specific niche (fursuits, cosplay, etc). A lot of creators only upload cut-down vidros or "trailers" to free sites with a link to their OF.
At least in my case, I simply see it like the Patreon model. I like supporting some of my favorite artists, especially with something like an ongoing comic series I'll get previews of and vote on polls to influence. Onlyfans is the same if I particularly like some creator. It's great that we can directly support content creators of all kinds now.
I think you're making assumptions about people's motivations that aren't consistent with evidence.
Pornhub and similar sites are full of content that is a dime a dozen and available for free and does not suggest any kind of "parasocial" relationship with the viewer. It's just two or more people fucking. And it's the same as it was ten years ago. And yet... More of that content keeps being made. Porn production companies exist. Pornstars making money for fucking on camera exist. Clearly there are people willing to pay for new porn that will just end up on free-to-view sites anyway.
Your mental model of "it's all about the parasocial relationship" doesn't explain these facts. Thus your mental model can't be the whole truth. I suspect it's at most a fairly small part of the truth.
The entire system is geared around feeling unheard, unseen and paying to be heard or seen.
20k people shouting into a a void. Paying to get a badge signaling you subscribed. Paying to highlight messages hoping they are read. Hanging on for that hope this popular person gives you 10 seconds of attention.
That's the reality of the depressing industry. And that's how the streamers and steaming providers like it. Ever wonder why the stream chat experience has never been improved? ;)
Oh, and the toxic communities it breeds.
Naked people aren't fungible.
As a person who tried to start a startup but had been hacked and assaulted by the organizations who seem to maintain their monopoly by whatever methods they can use it’s more like a mob of pimps than a single pimp.
Edit: Maybe there is a correlation between Gamers and Porn.
I think there is a darker side there: many of those subscribers are minors, who discover this kind of content for the first time. That's why OF models stream on Twitch to expand their audience, there are plenty of kids who came there for Minecraft, but will end up subscribing to OF with mom's credit card.
I mean look at the extremely popular K-pop bands, fans get insanely invested into these groups, following them, bringing glowsticks to show support, etc. Or the entire Japanese idol movement for that matter.
Or think about how people stand in line for hours just to get the signature of somebody at a convention.
I think this is just the way a lot of people are wired. I don't know if it's bad or a good thing, it's just something I've noticed.
I do remember a study that people often think label their more popular friends as their "best" friends, but if you go ask THOSE friends, they label THEIR even more popular friends as their "BEST" friends. It's often asymmetrical.
Though tbh going too far down these rabbitholes usually isn't healthy/productive imo.
I still think there are multiple differences.
One is how OnlyFans has successfully turned everyday people into this source of para-social fixation for a multitude of small communities and somehow massified the issue.
The other and the main one for me is that in both the star system or the K-pop industry the system is a mean to an end - selling movie tickets or albums - while OnlyFans genuinely sells the illusion of closeness.
Almost everyone I know thinks that things like OnlyFans are embarrassing at best, and disgusting at worst. Sure, most of us look at porn, but admitting that you've paid for it and _especially_ admitting that you have a "favourite camgirl" or whatever would be properly cringe.
sounds like you meant "professional courtesy"
But while there are successful people on only fans with either more or less clothes on, the vast majority of creators probably sell their dignity for a few dollars.
Agreed that there is something fishy about these new pimps. I guess there are still the conventional pimps too, but they now call themselves manager.
I don't see it as any less dignified than any other work. You sell your labor to someone who pays you less than the value it produces.
Now, if you want to argue that median creators get payed only a tiny fraction of their time, and like Twitch/YouTube it's a losing game for most, then we're on the same page.
A plausible scenario might be an FBI agent paying a confidential informant without creating an unexplained income stream. The FBI and friends disclosed spending around $0.5B on informants. The truth could be more. We don’t know what other agencies around the world spend. I imagine they aren’t putting cash in brown bags under park benches.
The reality is that OnlyFans wasn't the first to try this model. You have to give them credit for successfully building the business, especially with several close calls between them and government regulations.
A similar app creator talks about her experience and why it failed.
It seems she and Justin Mares are running some kind of micro-funding for passionate <25yos. $2k to help young people develop themselves; super cool.
The problem is the payment processor. How the heck do you accept adult-content related payments? That is the hardest problem to solve when it comes to these things in my book.
It's beyond knowing the business model, I guess the founder were at the right place and right time and knew the right people to make this venture succeed.
Also, the marketing, how the heck did these guy blow up so fast. The funds for marketing and all, it's not cheap!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/24/22639356/onlyfans-ceo-tim...
Recently they've tried to launch OFTV to try and build up more regular (non-spicy) paid content, but it's a tiny fraction of their revenue I would imagine.
Otherwise, paid porn was already on the downswing due to the rise of free tube sites. Onlyfans somehow got men paying for porn again.
When you can combine that experience with AI generated content, you will create something that I don't think anyone fully understands the ramifications of yet.
The strip clubs were closed, the strippers and the patrons moved to the online strip club.
This is a baffling section where the author goes out of their way to bash browsers vs apps. Maybe there are a lot of cons to apps that browsers don't have. Basically all of the sleights against browsers in this section are not true. When I buy something from amazon, from my browser, I definitely do not need to manually enter my credit card in every time.
For me, iPhone feels like surfing the web with a 46kbauds modem. Single page at a time. Want to load two? IT RELOADS.
Almost all my apps do this to me about once a month.
[Obviously I don't let Android update my apps automatically in the background. That way lies madness.]
Ok, looks like a total UI refresh.
Tried to schedule a bill payment (which previous version could do, uhh, for 10y+) and threw a dialog saying “coming soon”.
Cost can be a downside, of course.
For vendors the obvious downside is the Apple/Google tax, and is something even we need to be wary of at the company I work for.
But it's not the only downside.
I work for a company that offers a service via the web but, recently, we wanted to prototype some functionality that would exclusively be used from mobile and tablet. It uses the camera, does some nifty stuff with AI (and, to be clear, no, it's not a porn app!), etc., and I thought well, why not prototype it with and app? And, furthermore, why not prototype it as a native app with Swift? This should be the lowest friction route to ddeveloping and deploying an app to iOS, has full access to the platform's extensive built-in capabilities, and therefore it would offer the best user experience, etc.
And I've always been happy to sacrifice a quantity of developer convenience for the sake of offering a better user experience. At the end of the day if we, as engineers, wanted easy jobs we picked the wrong career: we should be aiming to make the lives of our users easier and more productive, and that's often really challenging.
And I'll tell you what: as far as it goes, if I didn't need the app to interact with anything outside of Apple's platform I might still use Swift. It's a nice language, and whilst XCode feels a bit like it Deloreaned in from 2005, it isn't completely terrible.
But that's not our app. It needs to integrate with a bunch of other services and here is where the pain kicked in. Swift and iOS are absolutely the poor cousins when it comes to library and API support. For so many things I wanted to do libraries were incomplete, and documentation was... well, it ranged from non-existent to wrong in critical aspects.
And because Swift is niche (relatively speaking) it's very evident that it doesn't have the kind of mature ecosystem, thought leadership or best practices around it that the likes of C++, Java, C#, Python, and others do. I might be speaking out of turn here but I also get the vibe that it doesn't attract the kind of best of breed practitioners that other more niche development platforms have, which yields better library and API support for them even though they don't necessarily have huge developer bases: think Go, Rust, Flutter, etc.
I don't want to denigrate Swift because, as a language in isolation, I liked it (even though it's Objective C underpinnings are never far from showing themselves). But as a development experience, it was a complete nightmare. Outside of functionality that depended only on the device itself I struggled to get anything working well.
You could put this down to, well, you're new to the platform, what do you expect? But I was able to otherwise be immediately productive in Python 18 months ago when I started working with it, and didn't run into these kinds of frustrations.
In the end I literally got to the point of, screw this, let's just use web, or maybe a hybrid app with the thinnest of thin native wrappers, or maybe flutter. But not native, no way.
[0] I say little anxiety rather than no anxiety because I'm not generally a fan of free apps the serve ads, where you don't really know what's on the other end, or how they might be tracking you, and often the UX is such that it's made a bit easier than one might ideally like to accidentally click an ad.
Eh, with WebGL and WebRTC maybe. The problem is input
This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does <company> need 10000 engineers?" takes true.
Generally speaking, <company> needs <number> engineers because it's rational to keep hiring while each incremental engineer generates more value than they cost in salary and overhead, even if some of those engineers are at less than 50% utilisation and have to generate pointless make-work for themselves to get past performance review.
AWS/GCP/Azure manage physical data centers across the globe, and includes hundreds of services/offerings on each platform.
Additionally, critical industries (hospitals, banks, airlines) often rely on these companies to be available/resilient at all times. Thus the need for increased global workforce. OF on the other hand, nobody is going to die if they can’t access the feet pics they bought for a few minutes or days.
You are not comparing the same companies.
At least compare it to companies with similar businesses. I would argue twitch seems closer. I think they had over 1000 employees. You would have a better point with that comparison if you would want to make that argument.
For instance moderation and community management alone must be a huge pool of people. While the content and comments can be adult, they'll need to deal with all the payment related back and forth, including chargebacks, legal inquiries etc. Same for doxxing, underage filtering, spam and so on.
I assume most if not all of it is a different company which isn't counted in the 42 employees.
Of course engineering can be treated the same, with sub-contracting companies dealing with the actual running of the service or part of the developement.
If Company A sells $100M of televisions which they imported for $95M they've made $5M in profit.
If Company B sells $100M of search ads which they served for $1M they've made $99M in profit.
From a revenue perspective they're equal - but $1M invested in Company A produces a 5% return on investment, while the same $1M invested in Company B has a 9900% ROI.
funnily enough out of the 42 employees still there, i assume less than a fourth are actually engineers.
OnlyFans has only about 42 employees. They didn't hire a bloated staff. That's impressive considering the sheer volume of content that passes through their servers.
It looks like OnlyFans has figured out how to do the porno business in a more or less legit way. So what's the problem?
were you replying to someone else making a comment attacking onlyfans?
IMO the lede is a bit buried within the article. The idea that a non-app could survive this well within the strangling iOS system should come as a revelation to the greater iOS community.
I can see how 10's of thousands of people paying $25 a month can generate millions but $25M on private messages in a year is over $70K a day - how many is she doing or how much do they cost each?
> In many cases, the responses are actually written by a member of the creator’s extended team – remember, many of these creators are now multi-million dollar enterprises, and its obviously impossible for creators such as Bhad Bhabie to engage in detailed and personalized conversations with their scores of VIP subscribers – though this alleged subterfuge has resulted in some legal action.
if you're talking to them in some kind of textual instant messenger, rather than over the phone or video chat, you can probably maintain two to four detailed and personalized conversations at a time, which would boost that number into the low thousands
you're just conversing with people, not fucking them, and there are in fact real-life prostitutes who serve scores of clients per month
still i'd probably agree if ball had said 'thousands'. but 'scores' sounds easy
Why? I have disposable income and I feel good when I spend it supporting creators I like. I subscribe to several Patreons of artists and YouTube creators, I’ve got that yearly Nebula subscription locked in, I buy merch and CDs from local bands (even though I don’t really listen to them after shows), and I also will pay folks posting tantalizing stuff on the internet. Sure I can get similar things for free, but sometimes I want content from that person and I see no issue giving them a couple bucks for it. I can afford it, so why not? Why do they not deserve it when I’m willing to also sub to a Patreon for someone who makes cool digital art on Instagram?
The “para-social” aspect is icky to me. At no point do I expect that this person knows who I am or has any care for me; any time I receive messages insinuating or fishing for that I ignore them. My “relationship” to them is a consumer who enjoys their work and is willing to compensate them for it, and that “relationship” only exists for a limited amount of time every so often.
I don't really understand this. Digital art on Instagram is generally unique, but porn is not. Sure, there are some onlyfans models that cater to a very niche kink - I get why people would pay for that. But most of them just post regular naked photos/videos of themselves.
What is the value proposition here? You probably wouldn't pay for a Patreon of an artist that draws those generic boring corporate illustrations that every company uses, even though they have a use and still take effort to create. So why would you support a specific person that makes content which is not in any way different from any other person like that?
Revenue wise, you'll make a lot more money tailoring content to a small group of users who will pay for custom content / live cams etc than having any mass appeal with small donations. The large social media funnel is mostly there to get model's content out there to find the whales.
Context: I have a side business deploying chat LLMs for OnlyFans models for fans to "talk" to that's currently at 65k/MRR. It definitely helps with user retention, as models who chat to their fans will have a 2x or 3x spend rate per fan.
Seems illegal, or at the very least a violation of OF's Terms of Service.
The OF content I pay for is usually from someone I discovered via Instagram or a camming site.
But the money I spend on camming sites is usually because it offers two things that aren't easily found elsewhere. 1) direct interaction with the models in real time and 2) seeing couples who are actually couples and have a real and pre-existing relationship. Part 2 is a tiny amount of camming content, but it is some of my all time favorite sex content.
The article makes mention of AI content potentially coming for this industry, but I believe it's the "GirlfriendGPT" and similar that will be the bigger threat, once they improve.
The article itself explains how subscriptions are a low part of OnlyFans business
But maybe this is only offering a glimpse
Many successful creators have a marketing strategy that includes a free subscription tier, and make money in pay per view DMs, or charging for DMs at all
So for people browsing for free pornography, its the same or better
Either way, its nice to see your attractive friends naked. Many women you meet in real life have a link in their social media bio that includes their onlyfans. In my world its very predictable based on visual attractiveness. Astoundingly, often it seems other women in their friend groups don’t know this and haven’t checked the “link in bio” of their girl friends. This masquerades as acceptance of sex workers.
Donate to streamer, get mention, get hit of dopamine.
Donate to OF person. Get a “personal” video. Get a hit of dopamine or whatever chemical corresponds to love/friendship.
I know girls who go the the gym. They work in IT and are not OF girls. They just want to stay healthy. People also don't smoke any more as much, and gen z drinks less alcohol then the other generations.
Baby steps towards the “dead internet theory”
Only in jurisdictions where minimum wage is less than $0.72/hr.
I wish I was cut throat enough to know real players in internet commerce
1. COVID: The explosion in revenues during 2020 is self explanatory.
2. Product market fit/Execution: The owners having previously created other, albeit, unsuccessful platforms certainly helped with creating Onlyfans. This is a very simple idea that thousands will have had, but creating it successfully necessarily requires a good understanding of a sector avoided by most major corporations.
Second point - is this really Europe’s most successful tech company of the last 15 years?!
> it is probably the most successful UK company founded since DeepMind in 2010
Not sure I can name many US companies founded in the last 15 years with higher revenue numbers
It's so easy to stick to international units, folks. Please. PLEASE!
The M lives on in languages like Spanish where the word mil means one thousand.
It's not as easy as you might think, given how many places I've seen that measure weight in Kelvin-grams (Kg).
Also
> It's so easy to stick to international units, folks. Please. PLEASE!
should be to stick to the language's usage of units. Not necessarily international units.
Even though the comment doesn't exactly apply now that I know MM can be used in finance, but I wanted to correct it to have a broader coverage.
If you look up the user demographics, you'll notice an obvious problem: The demographics do not include the number of users under 18.
https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/onlyfans-stat...
Some may say: well that's because you have to be 18 to use the site. But that's not true. Anyone can signup for onlyfans without entering their age. Onlyfans only does age verification for creators.
If you think this site isn't primarily being used by teenagers, then I have a bridge to sell you.
But if it's a common scenario for an adult OF creator to be sexually interacting with an underage teenager online (and, really, "grooming" them), are we going to start seeing life-ruining prosecutions of creators?
Incidentally including subpoenas of lists of creators and consumers, for additional chilling effect on both?
If so, could that kill OF's business, at least for Western creators, as well as for some consumers?
And if OF ends up with creators mostly in non-Western countries, with a reputation for preying upon UK/US/etc. teens (and maybe even reports of human trafficking, and/or funding sanctioned parties), will OF be banned in many Western countries? Maybe the most lucrative ones?
Separate from serious questions about what's ethical and healthy for everyone, given that the topic is OF's economics, I wonder whether they're making so much money because they're too close to the line of what's legally sustainable.
What do you mean by "preys on"? Teenage boys seek out porn, is normal. There's nothing magical about this type of porn. If they are breaking the ToS and committing credit card fraud, who's at fault?
Ask yourself, would you prefer your family members to be under an IRL pimp or run their own OF?
If you look at this realistically, OF is not nearly as morally reprehensible as an IRL pimp.
Probably common for a lot of luxury products; US is like 1/4 of world GDP, and a lot higher than that in personal income beyond basic needs.