Why is the platform killing its biggest USP?
Onlyfans forbids “sexually explicit content” – and thus deprives itself of the strongest unique selling proposition. But why? And will it be Tumblr 2.0?
For a company, a brand, one thing is the basis of all work: the unique selling point, the unique selling point. Without a USP, brands become blurred in the gray soup of suppliers, sales texts are a bunch of business bullshit and business usually doesn’t really go through the roof. Onlyfans was previously clearly defined on the market: The FSK-18-Instagram, the social network for virtual sex work. Now Onlyfans wants to ban “sexually explicit content”. But what is left then?
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Why is Onlyfans killing its unique selling point?
The official reason is: Onlyfans comply with the requirements of banks and payment processors. This could mean Mastercard who want to take action against unauthorized and illegal “adult content”. And that start out loud Mastercard, for “strict content control measures on websites” that accept Mastercard products. Among other things, they demand:
- Adult content sellers have effective controls to monitor, block, and remove illegal content.
- Consent for sexual acts and the resulting content must be clear, unambiguous and, above all, documented.
- Age and identity of sex workers and those who upload the content are checked and documented.
- Contents are checked before publication.
- There is a process that handles complaints about illegal or inconsistent content within seven business days.
- Anyone has the option to request the removal of any content in which they are depicted.
Solid rationale – The Verge but suspects that Onlyfans on one BBC research reacted: According to the BBC, Onlyfans had deleted illegal content from certain accounts, but not deactivated the accounts themselves. Instead, up to three warnings were issued. That means: Selected accounts were tapped on the fingers after illegal content became known – but nothing stood in the way of further uploading illegal content. At first there was no right consequence.
In addition, there are complaints from the German youth protection department: An age check is only carried out when users want to upload content themselves. Only one means of payment is required for registration, but people under the age of 18 can open a current account. That means, in order to do justice to the protection of minors and Mastercard, considerable administrative effort would be necessary: to check creators, users and the content itself. So it seems easier to saw off the “sexually explicit content”.
“Sexually explicit content” – what is that supposed to be?
A problem that Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok and all other platforms are already struggling with: How much nudity is pornography? In addition, there are sociopolitical questions such as the sexualization of the female body read: Why are nipples of men acceptable nudity, whereas nipples of women are pornography?
Allegedly, nude photos and videos should not be banned completely. That doesn’t make the discussion any easier, because in order to identify “sexually explicit content”, it would have to be defined where eroticism ends and sex begins. As soon as two people touch each other? When it comes to penetration? This also calls for socio-political discussions – and that in turn for the question of region-specific content guidelines. We see with existing platforms that these problems also cause enormous effort: Users report content, which has to be checked. This is followed by deletions, against which complaints are filed. They have to be checked again. Users upload content one more time, the same process is repeated. Content guidelines have to be revised regularly. It is questionable whether this is so much easier instead of setting up functioning administrative processes and requirements and ideally only having to decide on individual cases.
What is onlyfans without sex workers: inside?
Without the sexual content, some problems arise. Firstly, the creators who earn their daily bread with the content that will be banned in the future or who have earned a good additional income will change platforms. Likewise, users who are registered for sexual content at all will migrate. Anyone who wants to watch porn would no longer call up Pornhub if there were only documentaries left.
We remember Tumblr: after the ban on pornographic content, the platform had lost a third of its users within three months: inside and tremendously in traffic and was sold shortly afterwards for a ridiculous price. Tumblr is only a niche platform: Reddit is already a small platform with 430 million active users. For comparison: Instagram has 1.38 billion users (both figures are from Hootsuite via Statista). Reddit had 2.3 billion views in June 2021 (Hootsuite /Statista) – Tumblr on the other hand only 319 million (Similarweb /Statista).
Onlyfans could suffer the same fate: Without the unique selling point, namely sexual content and the interaction and thus building relationships with actors, Onlyfans is a platform like many others. Why should someone register when there is only content like on Instagram? Why should creators and users use the thousandth platform for paid content when Patreon, Steady and Co. already exist? In this respect, it almost seems a bit crazy that Onlyfans is sawing off its most powerful USP.
