Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators.
I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority?
If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their own Onlyfans, a reskinned and rebanded version of Patreon.
I wouldn't be surprised if Onlyfans is growing faster than Patreon right now...
https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba...
Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but also the massive audience that he/she influenced.
Unfortunately, you can only successfully stick to an allow-all policy (with all of the dangerous content and liability/bad PR this entails), or you can haphazardly try to enforce your often-subjective definition of morality with all of its inconsistencies and edge cases, to your own detriment, like Patreon did (I'm a moral relativist).
It's a Faustian bargain because neither is a good business decision.
> They're not banning anime. They're banning the fetishization of young girls, which has been against the community guidelines for quite a while:
> However, we have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape, and child exploitation (i.e., sexualized depiction of minors). This is true for illustrated, animated, or any other type of creations. Patreon reserves the right to review and remove accounts that may violate this guideline.
It leads to inconsistency, which leads to people creating content that is well within the guidelines deciding to not publish to Patreon as they can't guarantee whoever is enforcing the rules that day won't arbitrarily decide otherwise.
The typical characteristics of child-like appearances is proportionally large head compared to the rest of the body, round head, and large eyes.
It also happens that having a large head with large eyes is a common method to make it easier to express emotion for objects which we know is fake. For example, the two main robots in the movie wall-e utilize this a lot, and yes, one can interpret that as if both robots are children as they do have more human child like proportions than human adult proportions.
The only real way to know the age of non-photo non-realistic image of a character is in context or if the author spells it out. If we were to guess the age of Donald duck we would base it on that he has a job, has nephews, and wear a time appropriate hat for adults, but also that his head is slightly less round compared to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
(Lastly, hentai is obviously a very different thing than anime. It is clear that Patreon is targeting anime, as well as hentai.)
From what I know, the anime genre creators were a fairly popular niche (with the associated income stream), so they probably weren't taking these changes lightly.
I'd say write your congressmen (I'm not from US myself), but at this point it seems futile.
IIUC Tumblr and Craigs have similar problems as a result.
Video games are somewhat different, it's not a situation of a platform with user-generated content.
Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this. One of the side-effects of the earlier 'not tying payments super tight to individual creators, but just charging patrons for ALL their committments' is that it let them aggregate charges in such a way that patrons were doing business with THEM, not 'NSFWCamGirl69', while still supporting CamGirl as the patron intended. The credit card company didn't really have a way to dig in and go 'prove you're not giving any of this money to porn creators'.
This changed, but Patreon remains a platform where it screens creators pretty well from the moral expectations of credit card processors (and governments? kinda? It's a very tough problem if they expect to do business at all in certain countries)
The question is more 'will Onlyfans be cut off from service by credit card companies': 'growing faster' is not useful if it's doomed. They have to also stay in business and maintain relationships with processors that have a record of showing intent to blacklist certain types of creation.
Can this possibly be true?
CCBill's fees I think are like 11-15% plus $1k per year, pretty insane but underscores the risk
I could be wrong, but I didn't find a clear breakdown of who qualifies for each plan on their website. I'm guessing the 3.9% plan and their non-profit plan are there so they can present as a normal payment processor.
This is a few years out of date but when I investigated what it would take to legally accept credit cards for NSFW content, the processors all wanted a very large bond to hold as protection against chargebacks. I imagine once your daily transaction volume grossly exceeds reasonable bond levels, the processors get pretty flighty.
In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a reality that seemingly changes the course of companies.
They're not consistent with this though, Jim Sterling is in their top 50 earners and said the same racial slur in a podcast
https://archive.org/details/Podtoid/Podtoid189.mp3 @ 4:30
Not defending Benjamin, because he's said some disgusting things but they obviously only have a problem with it when it suits them.
"I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n-----s, just so you know. You act like white n-----s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f--gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n----r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me."
Seems quite ban-worthy to me, but of course each individual can judge for themselves. Do note that the whole section has a sorta racist slant best exemplified in the contrast between "white people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another" and supposed "black people" behavior.
But remember that Patreon has a diverse user base and some of those users will be very offended by things that don't offend you or I such as drinking, same sex relationships or transgender rights. If Patreon (as a profit seeking entity) sees financial risk, it's always going to engage in the most aggressive enforcement of any potentially profit affecting content. This is happening with Youtube now with the crackdown on firearms content, legitimate coronavirus talk and swaths of political content on both sides of the aisle.
At some point we need a way to have platforms that allow any legal content, even when that content is really reprehensible. I don't know if that solution is legal or just an incentive problem, but the mainstream-ification of all internet content at some point needs to be halted before free speech is genuinely quite harmed.
The issue is that right now those platforms can't really exist. Even if the platforms themselves had an incentive structure to do so, credit card processors would cut them off or heavily punish them in fees and rates.
Let's say you wanted to legally sell NSFW content. Perfectly legal, nothing morally objectionable. Well, you can't host it on several server providers immediately because their TOS/AUP restrict it. Some providers may allow it with significant restrictions.
Once you find a place to host, you still need to accept money. Paypal, Amazon, Google Pay, et al are right out. You can't use Stripe last I checked. You may be able to use Authorize.net or another middleman but you'll have to post a bond and pay a much higher rate. They may still cut you off.
And that's all for perfectly legal non-morally questionable content! That's for porn which 80%+ of the population indulges in.
> Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force
Except practically yes, they are.
And the above platforms DO exist, people CAN use them, and by God there's no shortage of porn on the internet.
(ccbill for NSFW billing, btw)
If anything, I'm pretty glad the absolutely despicable thing is no longer funded through them and kinda makes me want to contribute more money to Patreon somehow.
I've been a follower of/contributor to some people in that sphere (though not Benjamin, to be clear), but I can understand Patreon making that choice and preferring to be a platform for creatives like musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, etc.
Do you have any numbers to back this up with ? I think you are likely right but if there is any data on this then I would love to see it.
I remember seeing an article where the Patreon CEO said it wasn't sustainable a year or so ago, was this after they started banning nudes ?
Also I recall that Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and others left the platform due to censorship, which I believe happened around the same time as the CEO statement.