No more porn: OnlyFans wants to get clean
As of October, the business model of some OnlyFans publishers could vanish into thin air. The platform wants to move away from the image of the porn website. The move is intended to reanimate flagging investor interest.
Posting “sexually explicit content” on OnlyFans could be banned in two months. On Thursday the company announced that it wanted to implement a “new content directive”. The operator wants aloud what specific changes will result from this Bloomberg communicate in the coming days.
“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform and to continue to host an integrative community of creators and fans, we need to further develop our content guidelines,” explains OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely. “With these changes, we are meeting the wishes of our banking partners and payment processors.” It is unclear whether that is the reason alone. After all, the protection of minors had recently shown an increased interest in OnlyFans.
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Sexually explicit content undesirable in the future
Nude photos and videos should probably not be banned completely, provided they do not exceed a threshold that would probably be located at FSK 18 in Germany. The decision to ban sexually explicit content can almost be described as an about-face. After all, pornographic content is a key success factor for the platform, which has had more than 130 million users since it was founded in 2016 and has been able to pay out more than 5 billion US dollars to authors. In the past year alone, the platform had implemented over two billion dollars.
According to the company, around two million creators could be affected by the tightened guidelines, even if the platform claims that it does not know exactly how high the proportion of creative people is who only earn money with explicit content. It is well known that OnlyFans is a preferred monetization option for sex workers. Their share had increased significantly again in the corona pandemic.
Investors don’t see porn as an environment for their finances
The Axios experts see the change in strategy as being due to the fact that the company has recently found it increasingly difficult to acquire new investors. OnlyFans has been working on a financing round that is expected to raise the company’s value to over a billion dollars. The proportion of sexually explicit content is widely seen as an obstacle to further success.
The new content guideline would be a further component in a concept that has been trying to move away from the dirty image to a mainstream platform for musicians, athletes, fitness enthusiasts and cooks for some time. OnlyFans had a free streaming service called it just last Tuesday OFTV, an on-demand website focusing on topics such as fitness and cooking. This is also available for the first time in the app stores of Google and Apple to disposal. Their main requirement: No depictions of nudity.
