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Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

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Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#471

Post by random9749832 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #190
braza wrote: post #118

Not a moralistic take, but one issue that interests me is the second-order impacts associated with the long tail of producers in OF who do not make a career from it. 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…

> the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health. 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.

[flagged]

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#472

Post by random9749832 »

fleischhauf wrote: post #197
kwhitefoot wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health. 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.

that's the thing, the more people do it the more it gets accepted. the same is happening with drugs for example.

It is worse here because it is competitive as well. People get incentivised to do things they normally wouldn't in order to please whatever algorithm is driving the content on the site. A race to the bottom.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#473

Post by asdasdsddd »

samtho wrote: post #333
tjs8rj wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re the cohort putting our hand on the stove to remember you get burned. 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.

Yet humans have fared mostly fine as a whole with even a moderate level of those things, legal or not, consistently happening throughout history and cultures. The biggest problem we have is when these vices are driven underground so the vice itself is conflated with the additional risk of having to put one’s self in a dangerous situation to engage with it. Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident spe…

It's absolutely not western nor is it puritanical. The value is clear, there is a wide funnel like no other from starting drugs to ending up on the street, etc. Other societies, asian, middle eastern, etc found their way to the exact same values, sometimes enforced much harsher by the state.

This libertarian stance where neither you nor the state should care about how your neighbors lead their lives is the exception, not the norm, and it has its merits, but the cost of this ideology is obvious.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#474

Post by vunderba »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #402
makeitdouble wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow, how is listening to music performed by another human live different from watching another human performing a sexy act live ? The analog to actually having sex would be playing with the band on the stage.

Fair point. The reason I don’t think only playing with the band counts is: in a hunter gather tribe 70,000 years ago, did everyone sing all of the songs all of the time? Or did some people just listen, at least some of the time? Practically speaking I think it must have been the latter. Of course there are lots of unnatural aspects in live music still, like too many people, too loud, etc. But recorded music is wholly…

It seems like you're drawing an arbitrary line in the sand to determine what things are natural versus what things are unnatural. Furthermore, it seems like you think by definition, unnatural is negative.

By your logic, writing things down is also unnatural and we should've kept with the oral tradition only.

Natural is stepping on a piece of metal, contracting tetanus, and dying without appropriate medical treatment.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#475

Post by alt227 »

standardUser wrote: post #445
alt227 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a big news story about this happening literally the other day https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/tiktok-tattooed-wom... > Is it crippling to the point of ostracization? Nobody is arguing that it is, I think you are taking this a bit too far. All anybody has said is that some people have a dim view of sex work, thats it, and its true. Stop trying to extrapolate and assume further than the point in ques…

I don't know about you, but my life is too short to associate with troglodytes. Especially when there are so many amazing open-minded, open-hearted weirdos out there I can spend my days with.

No I dont consider myself so important that I am above interacting with anybody, nor do I think my opinions are better or more correct than anybody elses.

I think even if you were to spend your life just getting to know and educating 1 bigotted person so much so that they change they views just a little, that would be a life well spent.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#476

Post by michaelt »

paxys wrote: post #281

> The company counted an average of only 42 employees in 2023, down from 61 two years earlier. During the year, it generated $31MM in net revenue per employee (13-28x that of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and $15.5MM in operating profit (27-560x). This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does need 10000 engineers?" takes true.

Revenue per employee isn't a useful metric here IMHO.

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.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#477

Post by finnh »

michaelt wrote: post #476
paxys wrote: post #281

> The company counted an average of only 42 employees in 2023, down from 61 two years earlier. During the year, it generated $31MM in net revenue per employee (13-28x that of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and $15.5MM in operating profit (27-560x). This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does need 10000 engineers?" takes true.

Revenue per employee isn't a useful metric here IMHO. 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.

The quoted section is about net revenue, which in this article means total revenue minus the payouts to creators. In other worse, revenue minus COGS. It's a valid comparison.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#478

Post by hyggetrold »

Demiurge wrote: post #450
antimemetics wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every new generation is worse than the one before them

Dtaisk Afai. Cof Lemma, 19:1, 2, 549-552 / https://www.jstor.org/stable/25414613 Let me first give you four quotations. Firstly: “Our youth loves luxury, has bad manners, disregards authority, and has no respect whatsoever for age. Our children today are tyrants; they do not get up when an elderly man enters the room—they talk back to their parents—they are just very bad.” Secondly: “I no longer have any hope for the…

"It seems like nobody wants to work these days" has been a refrain since ancient Mesopotamia!

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#479

Post by neilv »

rybosworld wrote: post #412

It does seem like the business preys on, primarily teenage boys, in a way that traditional pornography does not. 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 f…

Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed teens would have the money. I'd have guessed the cash cows would be adult, well-employed.

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.

Re: Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics

#480

Post by ethbr1 »

afavour wrote: post #441
agumonkey wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shocking part is how new generation have a fully rational reinterpretation of all this, they call it "ethical sex". It's beautiful to them (probably in contrast to the boat loads of issues IRL social and intimate relationships can bring with them). And anything not aligned with their view causes a lot of angry arguments.

The circle of life. People said the same thing about Playboy when it first came out, about Internet porn when it first came out… People have been “falling in love” with strippers for as long as strippers have existed. In many ways OF feels like a positive step because it allows the removal of toxic middlemen that stand between the model and their customer. To my mind the bigger issue is how much of it is a total scam…

> OF models [...] using AI for [answering DM responses]

This seems like OF's Etsy trap moment.

On the one hand, scaling creator:individual_fan multiples via AI assisted messaging = $$$ (to creators and OF)

On the other hand, it canabalizes their core business value tenet -- authenticity.

It'll be curious to see which path they choose, and if it ends up playing out similar to Etsy. I.e. temporarily increasing their revenue while erroding their brand, then having to tack back once they realize how dire things have gotten in customers' eyes.

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