This may another massive exodus in the tech space as OnlyFans banned porn content on its platform. The service made the announcement as a means of ensuring long-term sustainability.
The news was announced last week and many have criticized the company’s decision considering the fact that the majority of its users are either there for explicit content or make those contents themselves.
There have also been reports of celebrities cashing-out big time on the platform due to their celebrity status while a lot of people have made their livelihood via the platform.
In my humble opinion, this is a very bad move for the brand considering the fact that the brand “OnlyFans” is synonymous with porn and explicity. Trying to capitalize on the success the name has earned the company and then removing its main selling point could be disastrous and could render the brand obsolete.
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Of course, OnlyFans wasn’t built to become a porn avenue or a place for people to pay for affection and so forth. It was in fact built as a subscription-based platform whereby content creation can be monetized in a two-way method thereby removing the middle-man.
Content creators on YouTube for example need to meet a threshold before they can either monetize or get paid however, OnlyFans allows content creators to charge fees for their works with OnlyFans taking just a little bit out of the money.
The platform blew because there is no censorship in whatever kind of content that’s being created in as much as it’s not a violent one. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic which was the time the platform blew through the roof and became the hub for paid explicit content.
One might say OnlyFans is being dumb this time but the problem can be traced back to payment processors bullying the company into banning sexually explicit content on its platform for a “clean image” – whatever that means.
The fact that Porn-related content makes up a big portion of the platform will make it hard for sex workers to earn a living directly via the platform and that could prompt them to move to other platforms.
After facing a lot of backlashes, the company finally addressed the issue making it known that sex workers have played a huge part in the brand’s growth and so it’s working on providing solutions for them even though it didn’t make this specific enough.
Because of the pandemic, many sex workers turned to live streaming to earn money, and OnlyFans was one of the top choices of platforms for them.
The decision to ban porn and explicit content on the platform seems to be a hurried decision without any clear specification and guidelines. With over 130 million paying users who watch different kinds of content, sexual content is a major part of this.
OnlyFans made it known that since its inception, it has helped creators earn more than US$4.5 billion.
A BBC investigation has pointed out that OnlyFans has been ‘lenient’ about illegal sexual content on the platform, and the company needs to deal with it in a better manner. While the firm needs to remove illegal content more aggressively, a blanket ban on porn is not the answer.
