Update: OnlyFans has backed down from plans to ban sexually explicit material on October 1st after substantial pushback from creators and users alike. The company is now credited as saying that they have “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community.” Basically, they’ve found ways to be marketable to those who didn’t want to do business with them because of the content on OnlyFans. Overall, this is cause for celebration because of the job security it brings to creators and sex workers who make a living off OnlyFans and feel safe because of it.
This story was originally published on August 23, 2021.
OnlyFans, a subscriber-only website, is taking a page out of the Tumblr handbook, announcing that it will be blocking sexually explicit material starting October 1st. For those who don’t remember, back in 2018, Tumblr decided that they were going to start blocking adult content. It was a move presumably geared at “protecting vulnerable communities” on the site that ended up leaving NSFW content creators with nowhere to post their work and the loss of years of work.
By March of 2019, Tumblr had lost about a third of its user base. According to PinkNews, Tumblr suffered a 150 million drop in page view traffic after their adult content ban. And if you check Google Trends’ analytics over the past five years to gauge interest in Tumblr, you also see a sharp decline in 2019 that has continuously fallen to this day. That’s what OnlyFans is risking as it begins its journey into blocking sexually explicit material.
Just to clarify, OnlyFans’ ban on sexually explicit material doesn’t mean that the site will be saying goodbye to its nude photos or videos. Those can still be posted. But if they don’t meet the company’s Acceptable Use Policy, account holders are out of luck and risk having their accounts suspended or terminated. This means that users who have found a safe space in OnlyFans risk losing their source of income, security, and the fan base that they’ve built on the site, despite being the reason why the site is so popular in the first place.
For entertainers like Bella Thorne, Tana Mongeau, and Michael B. Jordan, this presumably won’t hurt them or their pockets. The same thing goes for musicians, actors, and creators who have backups of content on other sites. But for many sex workers, who were abandoned by Tumblr and found a steady source of income on OnlyFans, it feels like a betrayal all over again, one that leaves them scrambling to find a new home for their content that pays the bills and keeps them safe.
Musicians like LIZZ — who has made revenue on OnlyFans with NSFW content — fall into the category of content creators that can rely on other social media platforms to make up the money lost. But that doesn’t stop her from feeling that this move is abandoning her friends and family, who have found a more permanent home at OnlyFans. “I’m worried a lot about my friends, my family, that have moved forward in life because of OnlyFans. People who were sex workers outside the internet,” she tells Remezcla.
And OnlyFans, according to LIZZ, was a new way for them to earn money “that was more secure and controllable.” With OnlyFans, creators were able to control the kind of content they post, how often they post, and the image they want to create based on their content. Now, OnlyFans wants to clump these adult content creators all together and throw them away after they helped the site build a 150 million user base with more than 1.5 million creators.
Ultimately, this ban is a betrayal of its core base that endangers sex workers’ lives and ability to pay their bills in an environment that they control. And if we learned anything from Tumblr and its sharp decline of users and traffic after the NSFW ban, OnlyFans won’t be long behind as its key demographic of content creators try to find a new home over at Fansly, PocketStars, or sites like JustForFans.