Hot Money: How OnlyFans revolutionized the porn industry for good!
Sex sells, period! It sells big time - big enough to make you eat your own words sometimes. That’s exactly what happened to OnlyFans in August of 2021, as the company announced that it would ban sexually explicit content on its platform. In a bid to distance itself from controversy, OnlyFans had made a grave mistake. Six days later, the company made an abrupt U-turn as it realized that 85% of its revenue comes from sexually explicit content. In 2020 alone, the company’s 150 million users spent $2.3 billion on their main platform. Without porn, OnlyFans is nothing. Although the platform was not originally designed for adult content, the platform has brought about a revolution in the adult entertainment industry, disrupting the old power structure of the shady business of internet pornography. OnlyFans changed the rules of the game & left behemoths like MindGeek (the company behind PornHub) scrambling to their feet!
Cook up a business!
In this episode, Bhavjeet and Anirudh talk about the heart of a home - the kitchen & find out some interesting business opportunities inside a kitchen. Check out the different ideas in the episode:
Founded in 2016 by Timothy Stokely, OnlyFans intended to be a platform for creators to sell content such as photos, videos & messages directly to users. Anything from fitness workouts to personalized shout-outs. The creators get to keep 80% of the subscription revenue, while OnlyFans pockets the remaining 20%. The platform is endorsed by stars like Cardi B and Bella Thorne as a great platform to market & sell exclusive content to fans. Soon enough, the platform started attracting porn stars due to its subscription based business model. The adult entertainment industry has been notoriously unfair towards the performers, especially after the rise of internet pornography in the 1990s. The entire industry has been historically controlled by a handful of shady characters who pocket the majority of the earnings, leaving the performers high and dry. Then suddenly, OnlyFans pops out of nowhere as a way to cut out these sleazy middlemen and take control of this endless revenue stream.
OnlyFans opened the floodgates - anyone with a smartphone and/or a small studio could now become an adult content creator. The Covid-19 pandemic proved to be a catalyst for the platform - from 20 million users at the start of the year, OnlyFans user base ballooned to over 150 million users by the end of the year. In 2020 alone, the transaction value on the platform increased seven-fold to cross $2.36 billion! Between March & April 2020, the platform witnessed 75% month-on-month growth in sign ups - that translates to 200,000 sign ups every single day! All in all, 82.3 million new users signed up for OnlyFans subscriptions in 2020, compared to 13.5 million new signups in 2019. With increasing audiences came more wannabe porn stars - OnlyFans ended its 2020 fiscal year with more than 1.6 million creators, up from 384,000 the year before. Today, the platform hosts over 2 million creators who generate 174 million monthly visits and 5.5 million daily unique visitors for OnlyFans.
The stunning growth, however, was accompanied by scandals & competition from all directions. The platform began facing allegations of underage adult content creators as well as sexual abuse on a regular basis. Between June 2020 and July 2021, OnlyFans received 783 requests for information from law enforcement authorities. In order to distance themselves from any more controversy, OnlyFans decided to ban sexual content on its platform. However, that move blew in the company’s face big time as OnlyFans scrapped the idea within 6 days. However, this flip-flopping cost the company - competitors began to gain ground on the upstart as soon as the news broke out. Competitors like IsMyGirl, ManyVids, LoyalFans, FanCentro & Fansly smelled blood in the water and were ready to bite off into the multi million dollar market - $390 million to be exact. That’s the share of OnlyFans revenue that can be directly attributed to adult content. FanCentro, for example, gained 20,000 new creators within 4 days of OnlyFans announcing the infamous ban. Despite all this, OnlyFans still rules the adult entertainment it has so successfully democratized. The company has changed the adult content market for good, helping adult content creators & performers take on and defeat the evil porn goliaths!