Commentary

Bankers And Porn: A Moral Quandary

OnlyFans began in 2016 as a platform for performers for a monthly subscription fee. The site has over 24 million registered users and claims to have paid $725 million to its 450,000 content creators. "Fans" (mostly men) pay "stars" a fee, generally $5 to $20 a month. The New York Times ran a story in early 2019 that claimed OnlyFans had changed sex work forever, dubbing OnlyFans "the paywall of porn."

But the internet has a long history of sites that build large followings with permissive porn policies, only to face obstacles from venture capital funders and banking resources that balk at funding porn sites. Tumblr was celebrated as a censorship-free zone in its earliest days, but after the sale to AOL, porn was quickly banned.

Now it seems credit card companies are pressuring OnlyFans not to provide sexually explicit content. And OnlyFans has decided to cave to the pressure. As of October, it will no longer allow sexual content on the platform.

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OnlyFans is a website with no app companion -- certainly because app platforms like iTunes won't allow explicit content.

And, while porn tends to get the bulk of the attention on OnlyFans, there is also a growing community of stars and celebrities who are building businesses there.

Here's a small selection of notable people on OnlyFans:

    • Cardi B, musician

    • Farrah Abraham, reality TV star

    • Blac Chyna, reality TV star

    • Bhad Bhabie, Internet personality

    • Aaron Carter, musician

    • Tyga, musician

    • Amber Rose, Internet personality

So, with OnlyFans exiting the porn business, only one mainstream platform that embraces porn now remains: Reddit, which aims to go public with a valuation now listed at $10 billion.  That fact seems to indicate the financial community and investor class is ready to turn a porn powerhouse into a public company.

Reddit is being sued by a woman who alleges that Reddit allowed pictures of her to be posted when she was underage, according to The Verge. In the suit, Jane Doe claims her abuser's account was allowed to remain active while the posts were under review, and he was able to continue posting after the illegal posts were removed. Jane Doe also reports that, after his account was banned, her abuser could create a new account and re-upload the photos. The lawsuit itself looks to invoke legislation involved in FOSTA-SESTA, a bill that exempts issues of sex trafficking from Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act.

But beyond the claims of underage porn, Reddit's large public porn sites are easily accessible and within the site's public terms of service.

How big is porn on Reddit? According to research conducted by Reddit user Bagrisham, it represents a full 22% of all traffic.

Quartz reports that 18.4% of subreddits are dedicated to porn, but that is based on data that is four years old. So that means almost a four percentage point growth in porn over the past four years.

Reddit has a long history of controversial subreddits but until now, there's been no issue of asking the public markets to invest in Reddit's risky communities. 

Before Reddit moves to the public markets, it's raising another $290 million  to round out its series "F" financing. That would bring its valuation up to $10 billion, from a $6 billion dollar valuation in February.

So, for now, Reddit will just have to stand ready to IPO.

Co-founder Steve Huffman told the Times, "We are still planning on going public, but we don't have a firm timeline there yet. All good companies should go public when they can."

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