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OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

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Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#361

Post by dragontamer »

onlyfansfan wrote: post #134
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investments aren’t loans, so you don’t have to pay it back the way a loan might be.

Thanks, I guess I was wrong on that count. It makes sense. The first part continues to baffle me. If I have a proven profit of $X/year and I have the market captured (speaking on the order of 10% or 50%, doesn't matter), how does it make sense to seek investment in the order of 100*X? What's the goal? Why not just keep milking the proven cash cow and stop growing and risking?

What risk is there?

* If you fail to grow, the investors lose their money. But the company still exists afterwards.

* If you succeed, you still get many benefits.

You're risking __someone else__'s money. And they're not even asking for the money back, just equity. In fact, a common scheme is to take the money, pay yourself, and do nothing. (Slightly fraudulent, but its really hard to tell the difference. Ex: all the yachts that Adam Neumann bought when he got investment money for WeWork).

As the CEO, you still get the salary, and that salary comes out of the investment money. So at a minimum, you often give yourself a raise for convincing other people to give lots of money to your company.

--------

There's also something to be said about cashing out. If you're tired of the grind of building a company, you can sell out and make $100s millions or $Billions with a company like this.

Ex: Notch burned out and dropped off the grid after a few years of Minecraft development. He took the $5 Billion offer from Microsoft and then largely disappeared. I don't think anyone can blame him, indie developers at heart don't want to deal with the politics of leading a 10+ million video game players.

Seeking investors is the path towards cashing out and retiring. You need to find a new owner of the company, and selling your stake / equity to them is a major step towards retirement.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#362

Post by Lambent_Cactus »

onlyfansfan wrote: post #97

A question to you entrepreneurial types. Why does an globally established and growing company with a proven business model want to raise a billion dollar investment? It's money they'll have to pay back with interest and I assume there would be other strings attached (like the high risk implied by the planned move that was now canceled). How is possibly better than organic growth at this point where they are probably…

OnlyFans is a classic two-sided marketplace with strong network effects. The more paying customers are already on the site the more attractive it is for new performers to choose OnlyFans as their platform, and the more performers there are on OnlyFans, the stronger the value proposition is for customers. That tends to give you a winner-take-all (or at least winner-take-most) market, where if you can establish a dominant market position is becomes self-reinforcing, you become very hard to displace, and can command very large profit margins. It's exactly the dynamic that has kept eBay the primary way of doing auctions online for over two decades.

When you have a market like that, it often makes sense to pursue growth as an end in itself, well past the point of profitability, because the reward for coming in first place (a durable monopoly) is way higher than a linear projection would suggest. Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) gives an especially clear explanation of this logic in Blitzscaling: https://www.blitzscaling.com/

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#363

Post by coliveira »

nradov wrote: post #271
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might me the case at larger consultancies. Also, some jobs even require a PhD, because it is super specialized. But overall, the ROI of degrees have plummeted. A friend of mine finished a Mechanical Engineering degree and couldn't find decent paying work for 2 years. He then moved onto website design.

Your friend may have struggled but overall Mechanical Engineering is one of the top 10 highest salary college majors. Most graduates are doing pretty well. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

The ones that get jobs, you mean.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#364

Post by yitchelle »

pelasaco wrote: post #246
whymauri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's pretty huge COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard. There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine. Across the whole world, too*. Many can easily make more than min wage, and in certain niches you probably don't even have to be 'conventionally beautiful' (sorry to use this term, but it's important I think) to make a living or sol…

In Germany, all Craftsmen are just laughing. Tiler, Carpenter, electrician, etc.. all of them have enough to do, can choose their clients and their wages. I understand that HN always will tend to talk about CS, but Craftsmen are doing their 40k/year, easily. The Salary potential is just increasing.

Comparing jobs solely based on income is a nonsense comparison.

The two class of jobs are so different. Scalability, physicality, career path, longevity etc all comes into picture.

The discussion has been going around in cycles for many years.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#365

Post by dmix »

> He said BNY Mellon “flagged and rejected” every wire transfer linked to the firm, while Britain’s Metro Bank in 2019 closed OnlyFans’ corporate account with short notice

So it wasn’t just the credit card merchants but wire transfers and corporate bank accounts. So stupid… at least CC merchants can blame chargebacks or something.

I guess it’d help if laws were clarified, in the UK where they are based as well.

Maybe we’ll find out if something changed soon.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#366

Post by noasaservice »

Lets remind people why this happened in the first place: extremist christian org "Exodus Cry" petitioned high power people in board roles to defund sex work companies.

Exodus cry's mission is seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. So, their gameplan is to always claim the last one (illegal sex trafficking) and child porn, to greatly muddy the waters of legitimate sex work.

https://reason.com/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-is-double-crossin...

Exodus Cry previously went after PornHub after they made claims of child porn and sex trafficking. PH ended up getting disconnected from payment processors, and they ended up deleting 14 million videos down to their verified members only.

Long story short: the drug war failed. And banning sex work for similar temperance reasons will only help people be LESS safe and run sex work underground (with no legal protections). Then again, that's this slimy christian org's goal.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#367

Post by Grakel »

Crontab wrote: post #314
rootsudo wrote: post #36

My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform. I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well. People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content. And the memes, I think they're pr…

I've noticed that a large portion of women submitting in the /r/Gonewild subreddit have an OF these days.

OF has ruined amateur porn. What used to be genuine and casual is now mostly bored-eyed pros with bad lighting.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#368

Post by foolinaround »

wernercd wrote: post #242
treesknees wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly true. It's not that an undergraduate degree is worthless, but it's become pretty standard. You may not stand above the rest with just a degree, but you certainly fall below the rest without one. I don't mean this from an intelligence or skill perspective, some of the smartest people I know don't have college degrees. But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it…

Add to that the fact that not all degrees are equal... there are plenty of "degree factories" that pump out useless people who don't know anything marketable. Having a degree is, as you've said, a requirement (I have a 2 year... I'm out on some jobs because of it)... Not having a degree is bad. Having a useless degree is worse as you now (generally) have the debt of a paper that means nothing.

> Having a useless degree

Do you mean a degree in weird subjects, or from non-famous colleges?

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#369

Post by ed25519FUUU »

treesknees wrote: post #99
whymauri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's pretty huge COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard. There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine. Across the whole world, too*. Many can easily make more than min wage, and in certain niches you probably don't even have to be 'conventionally beautiful' (sorry to use this term, but it's important I think) to make a living or sol…

Bhad Bhabie (cash me outside meme girl) made over $1M in 6 hours and said she could retire right now from the amount of money she has made off OF. And she's not doing "porn" or even posting fully nude photos. There's a big movement to gain a lot of followers on social media like TikTok and then redirect those followers to their $5/month OnlyFans. There are a lot of people making a living or at least significantly boo…

OF is probably similar to Etsy, where the 95th percentile make millions and the median income is $0.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#370

Post by dalbasal »

63 wrote: post #46

I'm curious how much this may have impacted their users regardless. I imagine that a lot of people learned that relying on a single platform is dangerous and how important it is to diversify your online profile. I don't think people will trust Onlyfans anymore.

That's decreasingly a risk you can avoid, whether you are an only fans user/model/entertainer (what's the OF equivalent of a youtuber?) or OnlyFans itself.

It's risky to be dependant on an App store, cloud computing platform, social media platform, payment processor, etc. They might change their rules, ban you over a rumour, or just quietly change their recommendation or advertising algorithms to exclude you. There aren't a lot of substitutes, and even if there were, switching can mean leaving behind users.

OTOH, you have no choice. All the opportunities are on these platforms, not just risks.

To be a youtuber, you need to be on youtube. Diversifying to other platforms is doing stuff other than being a youtuber is hard. You can't just take your users, revenue model and such with you. You could try also doing IG or OF, but in the same sense that you can also practice law on the side. Sure, it gives you security, but not in a portfolio kind of a sense.

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