Bella Thorne, OnlyFans and the battle over monetising content
bbc.com
bbc.com
Viewers (the subject) actually believe they have a relationship with the object (be they a pro gamer or scantily-clad model). To most well-adjusted folks with a healthy social circle, this seems kind of nuts, but parasocial relationships have a long and sordid history -- starting with the invention of the "fireside chat" on radio. Loneliness is a powerful motivator and the psychology here is profoundly interesting. At the end of the day, I'd say places like Onlyfans end up being net negatives for both the models as well as the fans. It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djMojvschs0
[1] https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20...
A single ticket to an NBA playoff game ranges from about $150 to over $5,000 (back when you could go).
You can see the game for effectively free at home, with better commentary, exactly the snacks you want and all of that.
A night at the symphony or opera starts--starts--at $50 a ticket, and can go to $1500 easily. After the show is over, it's over, and all you have is a memory.
Good seats at a popular rock concert are easily $250. You can get the mp3 for next to nothing, and it will be a better recording too.
Even just a movie these days starts at almost $20.
And yet people still fork out the money. It isn't just the show itself that they are paying for, it is the entire experience. The interaction, being part of the crowd, a crowd. Many things.
The value captured by an entertainment here isn't just the bits of the picture.
And I say this as someone who would never, ever pay for the content I know of on only fans. But I have sunk a lot of money into the other things on the above list.
While trivially true, this is extremely reductive. People don't attend basketball games, operas, or go eat at Michelin star restaurants because they're lonely. People donate thousands to streamers and models because they are.
Or because they like the entertainment? Some guy on twitch donated over $20k, over half of it for college students to do push-ups in exchange for free food (about the other half was tips to the workers of the streaming food truck [0]).
A happily married couple both watch a food streamer [1], they donated hundreds of dollar, probably over 1k.
Hell, I donated around $300 between the two mentioned streams, I’m happily married as well.
When people donate to FOSS authors, it’s because they want to support their work, but when they donate to streamers it’s because they are lonely?
Now certainly. There are those, and probably a lot more on streams featuring scantily clad women. But reducing it to that level is just wrong.
Speaking of being reductive...
Consider the possibility that people also do it because they enjoy the interaction they get out of it, however shallow and/or fleeting.
The same way some people pay top dollar for a "meet and greet" with rock stars or athletes before a show or game, where you get to shake hands, take selfies and trade platitudes with famous people and then they never see you or think of you again.
People donate to streams to hear the streamer thank them or call them out by name or interact with them, in some manner, for some amount of time.
I'm not saying loneliness is not a factor, but it's definitely not the only factor. Like everything else to do with human interactions, it's complicated.
And it feels good. I might be getting music or ML models or whatever out of it, but at the core, it feels like I've made a positive contribution. It's personal, and I can imagine its direct impact in the recipient's life.
In the case of art and music, there's also the touch of living vicariously through other creatives that are building a different skill set than I chose. I picked programming, and though it's too late to go back with all that I've got going on in my life, it's fun to imagine what could have been if I'd practiced sketching every day.
I don't know about Twitch and OnlyFans users, but I can totally imagine donating for motivations other than loneliness. Maybe it's validation. Maybe showing off. Or maybe they're simply saying "I like what you do, please keep it up." And maybe the donors are getting a fun in-game commentary or something else as an added bonus.
Don't decry it. I think these evolutions in patronage are interesting and exciting.
I recently supported the new Patreon page created by a podcast host who I have been listening to for over 10 years. He sent all his supporters a short personalized video, and watching that video gave me the feeling of an authentic personal connection. Of course there's no deception going on here, I do believe that he genuinely appreciates my (very small financial) support, but there's no expectation that we're now "actually friends" in the traditional sense (he has hundreds of supporters). But still, it's a nice feeling of personal connection, and it doesn't feel like an indictment of major social problems plaguing society (other than perhaps the obvious lockdown-associated reduction in human contact).
Of course, in my example there's nothing remotely flirtatious or sexual going on, which as I understand it is common on OnlyFans. Maybe that detail makes it completely unlike my example, but it really doesn't feel that different to me.
I think it's reductive to consider that people are only on OnlyFans because they're lonely. People frequented strip clubs forever but I don't think everyone at a Vegas strip club is there because they are lonely.
Your model when thinking about this is to assume everyone thinks nude people are fungible, but people used to buy specific gossip magazines at the grocery store to see SPECIFIC celebrities caught in the nude. So this is not something new.
or they view it as another form of entertainment and want to support it.
If you don't think a big part of the appeal of sports fandom is artificial group connection of much the same type as the kinds of artificial individual connection some people seek through the entertainment you are denigrating, I think you are quite mistaken.
But, again just as for sports, just being entertained is a big part of this, too.
I never used OnlyFans, but from my point of view, if those using it are mostly lonely guys, then it does not sound that bad. Had they had girlfriends who would objected, I can see relationship issue there.
But other then that, lonely guy using strip porn made by someone who did porn voluntary does not strikes me as massive problem.
Most musicians sound like shittier versions of themselves live. Some of them have great sound engineering teams and enough vocal talent (Most often its the singer that struggles live) to actually sound as good as they do in a studio. When you have the perfect situation, the overall effect sounds better to me. Only been to a couple Tool concerts. Neither were 250 but tickets can get pretty expensive after something sells out. Another part of it is the experience but for me its mostly the way it sounds when they get it right.
Probably genre dependent but I would have to disagree. Live recordings are more raw and less produced - with a band that has their shit together live it's magical because there's an authenticity to the sound and level of immersion that is impossible to get from a recording at home.
So the correct analogy would be looking at porn/onlyfans and going to a brothel
You can see the game for effectively free at home,"
Being front row to an NBA game or Symphony are is totally incomparable to 'watching at home'.
'To each is own' but one is a commodity, one is not, which guarantees the pricing structure even if we valued them the same.
So these examples won't help us understand I think why people pay sex workers to pay attention to them.
Yes, except with social relationships, exactly the opposite things are of value. You want to be as exclusive as possible with the other person, so that you both have as much of other's attention as possible. Otherwise, what's the point?
The value of being one a part of a crowd at a sporting event versus being part of a crowd on a platform like onlyfans, where the entertainment is social interaction are completely different and the analogy doesn't really hold (for well adjusted people, of course)
That's what makes this phenomenon so striking.
Wait what?
That's definitely not true for non romantic relationships. Even in the context of a traditional monogomous romantic relationships that sounds incredibly unhealthy.
Anyways i disagree generally. People don't spend $$$ on backstage concert tickets because they want to blend into the crowd. I have no idea what goes on at onlyfans, but i doubt people use it as a literal replacement for in person interaction in the same way i doubt strip clubs, brothel's, etc are used by their patrons solely to replace "normal" socisl interaction.
I feel like this metaphor fails at all points.
They don't call it the oldest profession as a joke. Social interaction and validation is the single most valuable thing to human beings, and it always has been. The basic business model of OnlyFans is absolutely no different than what has occured since the beginning of human civilization.
The first is to check out games I'm interested in. The streamer is mostly incidental unless they're actually getting in the way of seeing the game. YouTube exists for this too, but I find the spaces in between the highlights that you see in streams to be more interesting than the structured reviews.
The second is to watch them play a game I've already played, usually in the hopes they enjoy it too. It's a form of validation of my own experiences, it's just nice to see someone happy at the same things I guess, and also a way to relive a story I might have mostly forgotten but through a fresh perspective.
I think you may even be in the minority. I would expect most fans of twitch streamers to be an actual fan, not there to merely enjoy the game (even tho the game is actually enjoyable to them as well).
On youtube, it is more likely the opposite - "fans" on youtube enjoy the content, more than the youtuber. This is typically why once a youtuber becomes well-known for one type of content, that they cannot switch away (see the countless minecraft content creators that are somewhat burnt out by minecraft, but continues to make it since it is the majority of their views). Content creators who _are_ personalities and can branch out, have already done so to twitch.
I think this is an important one. Growing up as kids, we'd often sit next to siblings (or parents) to watch them play games, turning them into a shared experience.
I prefer watching shit on TV with my girlfriend over watching it alone as well; like you said, having someone else react similarly validates your experience.
As someone from a mainly secular country, I have often pondered the loss of a central gathering place the places like a church give to society.
A weekly service really helps foster a community. The only other thing that does is schools, but that excludes a huge swathe of people.
Obviously Japan is also known for hostess clubs where men pay for attention as well as regular old Soapland stuff.
[1]https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/255090/japan-lonely-women-pay...
It's dystopian as fuck but it fulfills a need, apparently.
The Netflix miniseries Maniac has something similar, a company called Friend Proxy where you can hire someone to act like a friend of yours. It's a really interesting take on the cyberpunk genre, it's worth watching.
When I asked him about it, he said "the messages are personalised and it doesn't feel artificial. They kind of lead you on to pay more as the interaction goes on".
I would be really surprised if it is not bots interacting at this point. The kind of messages he was talking about being "personalised", felt very generic, at least the initial ones and they could reuse the same content over and over again with others.
Even if the chat bot would lack verisimilitude, I can imagine outsourcing the messages to developing countries and adding some tools to let them make quick, cash-generating responses more efficiently.
Arguably, this has been attempted already with Projekt Melody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Melody
Twitch suspended the account, and a bunch of biological female streamers were pissed that a computer-generated female was cutting into their market.
For content as well, you can scrape other platforms and create a new identity.
I don't know who I would trust to enforce that kind of thing.
A lot of times I do end up wishing there was someone who would set me straight every time I attempted to eat unhealthy or not exercise. But it seems like the imperative in modern society is that you're just going to have to learn to resist temptation on your own, or you're done for - good luck. I don't really understand this, because I can say that I want to improve myself all the time and be fully aware of my mild desire to do so, and be willing to have someone put me on the right path, and simply never get around to it all until it's too late.
And then there's climate change, where I have accepted that trying to convince people to change is hopeless on a large scale. Who is going to be trusted to make the decisions "for our own good," without another yellow vests movement springing out in opposition?
They are sort of like streamers with webcams, but they do not expose their real image. Instead they make up a fictional backstory and have an artist create a visual representation of them that gets motion/face tracked. It feels like an offshoot of traditional Japanese idols, with the same merchandising and live events, but with a totally different distribution method.
Personally, as someone that doesn't understand the appeal of real-life idols, I end up watching a lot of the virtual people because even though I understand there is a system behind it, it does fill in the desires that stem from being lonely. Yes, it is not a substitute for human contact, and I am fully cognizant of this every time I watch, but the most interesting parts for me come from the interaction between the different streamers instead of the streamers with the audience anyways. They frequently do collaborations, and eventually there comes a weird sort of mythology that emerges where you and the other streamers gradually understand the most memorable qualities of each (one is perverted, one is the most "idol-like", one is a fluent speaker of English and has knowledge of American meme culture, and so on). Sometimes they also exude a form of the "heel and face" aspects of professional wrestling. Thus when you come back for more you see the same group of characters in new situations, and the backstory you have previously built up in your mind increases your interest in what happens. It feels kind of like a long running soap opera, or indeed professional wrestling, except with much more emphasis on personalized interaction and a lot of people yelping at each other in a foreign language. That's another thing. The fact that most of the members do not speak English and there are no official translations of most of the content gives the experience an odd foreign quality where the streamers will desperately try to translate things or greet people in broken English, which they promptly forget, in order to "summon the foreigner people". That in itself becomes a meme that the group capitalizes on heavily.
I think the fact that you do not see a real person sets your expectations that you are watching someone with a fictional backstory better, and even so you can still enjoy the things they talk about. Unlike actors, they frequently talk about things like going to the convenience store to buy snacks or cook things or discuss that one time that one member paid for the bill for another and then forgot to leave enough for the subway home, in the context of the actual people going incognito and doing things off-stream. Even supposing it was scripted, it does not feel like it at all, more like they were given a general list of topics and free reign to more or less day what they want. It gives it a very human quality that static television or movies or idol concerts do not usually provide, and I think that is the key thing that people (me included) keep coming back for. The virtualness also implies that you do not necessarily have to "sell your body" to make it big as an entertainer, which I think is a relatively recent innovation.
Then there are things that happen like a steamer sneezing triggering a flood of donations, some over $100. The donators are very concious of the image of their kind that gets posted on the Internet. In fact some of the streamers themselves go to great length to satirize the donation culture, the CEO of the talent company that manages them, and "real" idol groups that existed before, also categorizing each character by different dimensions (most to least pure, etc.). It is a very integrated system, and I can easily underand how it can suck people in, having been sucked in myself for a while.
That does not change the fact that a system still exists however. Recently there was a very high profile "graduation" of a member who hadn't even been streaming for two weeks over a doxing scandal, which was really a cover for "firing to save face." It really does remind you that it's just the entertainment business in a different manifestation.
7 out of the 10 steamers with the highest donation amount on YouTube are virtual YouTubers. There is clearly a market being tapped here. Whether or not people should or ought to, if they are "slaves to loneliness," is a different question I don't really want to pursue.
What's equally sad is the special moderation privileges given to large streamers by Twitch.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/ikce21/xqc_...
dunno about these 2 but it is not _fundamentally_ different from how many stars build and maintain their "brands" these days.
People like e.g. Jack Black have a youtube channel or at least an instagram feed and share "slices of life" (edited or not) with their fans.
That's also a parasocial relationship.
I'm not understanding what you mean there? Aren't they making a lot of money for only a little work?
Some are, but at the cost of privacy, having weirdos stalk you online, potential future job prospects, etc. Not to mention the time and money that goes into actually taking photos, curating, responding to messages, etc. It's not as easy as it might seem.
And about the privacy, I think online models like Belle Delphine and the likes still have a far greater possibility to appear anonymously outdoors than Hollywood actresses or even state level politicians. In reality, they're not getting paid for supplying photos, appearing in movies or singing into a microphone, they're getting paid for letting the common folk have a voyeuristic view into their private life.
This reminds of porn, whereby, once you're out there, then you're out there. Good luck working with kids or anything involving kids. Even females aren't exempt from the scrutiny.
Or any job where guys recognize you, now you're screwed if you have any aspirations to remain anonymous or even lead a normal life. You'll need a community of people supporting you.
It seems like an endeavour where the potential for regrets is high. Look up most pornstar bios and they usually end up with them having a hard time readjusting to the regular world and few ever manage to move past their old life that they end up going back to porn cause it's the only family that accepts them, but at the cost of exploiting them more.
This might not carry necessarily the same stigma, but the fact that many people treat it the same is problematic.
Sure, it has some disadvantages, but I'm fairly certain that for most people the advantages far outweigh them.
That said, people will pay for what they want whilst others will pirate for their favorite given reason(s) be it porn, movies, books, audiobooks, &c. Similar for not contributing via Patreon; maybe they'd rather some ads and half the content to not spend a few bucks a month, for example.
Reasons abound.
[1] https://jizlee.com/ethical-porn-consumption-pay-for-porn-ant...
I like my money too much to part with it, but realistically if I were to value my time rationally paying $100 for takeout would be a worth while trade when I look at how long cooking takes. Then if I am willing to spend $100 on food, why not on something else I might enjoy?
As I said, I don't, but that feels more like a character preference for investment/hoarding instead of any rational cost/benefit analysis.
This gets into what is real and the power of anticipation. There have been a lot of studies that show the biggest endorphin bump for a vacation is in the planning, not actually going and experiencing the locale. This is going to really change as VR matures. People will be having lots of experiences at home in a very immersive way. This includes front row at a concert, walking tours of a far off city or attraction, and obviously VR porn integrated with mechanicals. We have vivid dreams all the time and they are not "real", I think these things will feel even more real for the immersion.
We aren't. Parasocial relationships are characterized by being unilateral (i.e. subject → object) and idealized (where there's an illusory personal connection). I doubt either of us feels that way :)
That's because you seems to misunderstands theirs needs and misunderstands the cost of what you consider "freely available offline". I recently saw a tiktok of a girl crying because she fake one, well they are just putting a price over that effort.
> It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own.
Yeah, it's something that I realize day after day. In the past it wasn't like this, I've seen so many people make real connections, but since a few years, maybe a decade, making friendship over the internet seemed to have changed (maybe it's just me though).
I feel like you got something with theses fake relationship. They are so much easier to maintains, they are easy source of dopamine and they still "feel" like real ones, but they aren't. Some pay for them sure, but Youtube videos are another cheap ones, mostly the vlog format, are most probably source of many of them.
The actual lonely hearts are rare and far between.
Certainly in comparison to the professional pr-speak of most other politicians.
AOC, among a very few others, seems to have tapped into something similar.
Real time is also nice.
His most enthusiastic fans defend him because they feel a connection to him. Like he cares or wants what's best for them and that he's approachable.
Offline relationships cost a lot of money, as well.
Don’t base your world view on anecdotes from a carefully edited documentary. In reality almost all the customers know it’s a fantasy, so what’s wrong with fantasies?
I'm not sure what you mean. The documentary seemed fairly middle-of-the-road and interviewed both fans as well as models. It's pretty clear that parasocial relationships aren't healthy (whether it's with a game show host or an Onlyfans model), so I would definitely push back against "almost all the customers know it’s a fantasy."
You have no idea whether the interviews are with a realistic sample of the customer base. All it takes is focusing on a couple whackos to make the entire customer base look similar.
And if you made that documentary, who would you focus on? The normals, or the outliers? If you want the most entertaining product that will make you the most money, you’ll choose the outliers.
Not saying this is the case here, but as a documentary nerd, this is absolutely not true. There are plenty of cinéma vérité documentaries out there.
That's because neither Emma Stone nor LeBron James figured out how to enter into micro transaction relationship with the fan base. Bella Thorne did. The rest will now either have to flip into that mode or lose their celebrity status.
Paris Hilton made between $250,000 to $750,000 to walk into a club for one hour.
Social media has created a new type/class of celebrity but it isn't replacing the old ones.
That's no longer the case. Social media celebrities who have not broken into the mainstream celebrity class are on downward trajectory as the social media has been democratized.
I have shamefully worked (for a short time) for a company that used to have serious meetings about how to exploit these types of people.
I've had a lot of friends into camming, and tbh it kinda sucks to watch some of them bend their morals and who they are more and more as it becomes harder and harder to ignore the money that comes with it.
LeBron James licensed the shit out of himself for video games, action figures, commercials, etc - and I'd argue other than the commercials, which are exploitve by nature, none of this is specifically exploiting anyone. It's entertainment.
I'm asexual, but I have absolutely nothing wrong with pornography on principle. I still have friends who cam ethically.
Unfortunately in the past performers more often than not ended up exploited. Now the tables are turning and some performers like Bella just end up exploiting their viewers, and that's just sad.
I mean Bella literally bailed on $200 pay per view stuff and essentially exploited her past as a Disney star, of all things, to draw attention to herself, and as a result has single-handedly irreversibly screwed over the lives of every other performer on the site by forcing monthly instead of weekly payments.
Bella Thorne didn't figure out how do to micro transactions. She thought she could take advantage of her micro celebrity status to give herself an advantage over others, exploited hundreds, and screwed over hundreds, probably thousands of performers.
I have a lot of friends in the sex industry and camgirl industry as the queer communities which I am a part of often are supportive to these folks, and it's awesome that the people who choose to do this non exploitavely can do it. I don't think it's that different in that case from being any other kind of celebrity, except I do believe it is obviously objectively riskier.
I don't think what Bella did was right, but in my personal opinion, charging $200 to view some images and soliciting "donations" of over $100 a pop is extremely exploitative, so I'm sorry, but I don't have much sympathy here.
I disagree. She screwed over lives of every other performer on a platform by showing up and running the numbers. Her being a former Disney star was immaterial - she happened to be someone that people fantasize about seeing naked or barely dressed hundreds if not thousands times more than they fantasize about seeing other camgirls, etc. Some of those people were willing to pull out their credit card. The response would have been the same if it were one of the Hadid sisters or the likes of Emma Watson.
> Bella Thorne didn't figure out how do to micro transactions. She thought she could take advantage of her micro celebrity status to give herself an advantage over others, exploited hundreds, and screwed over hundreds, probably thousands of performers.
Either her or someone in her camp convinced her that by doing what she did she would make a massive amount of money based on micro transactions as opposite to getting $20,000-$50,000 appearance fees or $200,000-$2,000,000 deals.
It is no different from celebrity influencers pushing out the micro-influencers by consuming the available market. Those with millions of followers will command more attention and hence more money than those with thousands.
> I have a lot of friends in the sex industry and camgirl industry as the queer communities which I am a part of often are supportive to these folks, and it's awesome that the people who choose to do this non exploitavely can do it. I don't think it's that different in that case from being any other kind of celebrity, except I do believe it is obviously objectively riskier.
The celebrity is measured by the amount of money these people can make via fees. Clearly Bella can make orders of magnitude more than the others which is why we are talking about her and not about a cam girl with 450 paying followers.
Someone could argue the opposite: It's a net positive for a model who is able to separate herself from the work and use it as a means to earn money, and it could be a sufficient honeypot for men who would have otherwise become predators.
Personally, I would call it an unhealthy relationship. I think it's vastly in favor of the models because they're making money at the expense of extremely desperate older (i.e. wealthy) men. It's sort of a creepy-man trap, shepherding these men towards the models (remote/safe) and away from potential victims.
It would take more than "documentaries", which AFAIK are always going for sensational, but false conclusions.
Good question. Similar question: how sure are we that the whales in mobiles games or Casinos are not getting more benefit than we think?
The amounts spent are often quite substantial on the fan's side, while they are one among many viewed from the streamer's side. I don't think there's reciprocity.
I honestly think they should be deplatformed, one way or another. Young men in their teens and twenties are psychosocially damaged by this style of money-mediated intimacy, and at best they will play catch up with their peers the rest of their lives, and at worst will be permanently stunted. If I had a son, I'd honestly prefer he end up addicted to nicotine than to OnlyFans. (Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes.)
We also need to recognize that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men from it and pull men out of it if they find themselves trapped by it.
> Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes
That's quite rude, particularly when you basically say the opposite in the following paragraphs.
> men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness
Men as a class are vulnerable to a lot of things, but they are a hard demographic to reach and, fundamentally, very few people care about their mental health.
Just today, BBC Radio 4 passed a news headline about UK suicide numbers being at their highest in 20 years, with 3/4 of them being men and mostly between 45 and 50 years old. The headline before (risk of quarantine for UK tourists in Portugal) and the one after (Facebook vs Australia on news links) were longer and both had a relevant expert interviewed, but not the suicides one.
> that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men
Interesting. The ancient lawmaker Solon instituted public brothels with a standard fee as a public health measure. But people think that s horrible -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. I guess the suggestion is that people shouldn't have sexuality or desires, they should just cut off their genitals and live as vegetables. O what a world we live in
Being choosy about your culture and protective of your youth on a societal scale is necessary. Without it, corporations with Billions of dollars will be competing to extract as much value out of children of families with a median net worth of about 40k. And that already massive imbalance is only getting worse and worse, not just through inequality, but through technology where corporations are more and more able to access their entire mind in evermore convincing fashion (VR up next!).
So you’ll take base desires that should be met as naturally as possible (sexual desire met with supervised interaction with peers of the same age) and you suddenly have unlimited virtual reality porn with facetuned, hyper optimized algorithm, AI generated responses, and suddenly you have a new generation of “incels” or similar who were so satisfied by their internet porn addiction that they never were forced to grapple with... well, real women, and the fact that they are absolutely not constantly sexually available and hyper optimized for your pleasure. And then you have Big Problems.
Listen, these are all, like, opinions, man. But with where we are heading with technology. Having seen TikTok and how it’s radicalizing and dopamine retraining a whole generation... I wish the government would get a whole lot more overbearing with requiring regulation - not to ban it per se, but to ensure platforms that provide it must validate age with more than a checkbox, etc. At least that Apple continues to provide evermore effective parental controls.
Should we be surprised people spend that much on porn? I certainly am, especially with its presence almost everywhere today. So there has to be another factor that draws people in. Maybe they have just fun and this is over-analyzing things.
(There's a good doc about this on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsK_6VSmlMI)
Life has a lot of coincidences, but the real question is- were they making lemonade from lemons OR is it artificial lemon juice, something that looks like lemons but isn't?
It's the same reason why the biggest Twitch stars can do pretty much anything on stream and not get banned, while normies get the banhammer immediately for lesser offences.
Dude did nothing and got banned.
Now I hadn't heard of Bella Thorne either, but that's a different story.
Well, good old prostitution has been pretty successful since the dawn of mankind, so the answer must be "yes" for a lot of people.
To be fair, much like drug dealing, it's not clear how "successful" prostitution is.
Much like anything else, there is a power law distribution in effect. A few make a lot of money, but a lot make very little.
Of the women I have known on that path, I know of only two who actually didn't wind up in a bad place at the end. Drug addiction was the primary problem--if you work in the sex industry you work with a LOT of scumbags who want to hook you on drugs in order to control you.
We pay for lots of (social/emotional) illusions in entertainment. People tend to suggest that this is a risk of the kind of illusions they don't indulge in, and you certainly can see examples of it with lots of those illusions, but I don't think it's exclusive to any of them.
Though in the illusion of personal connection, it's probably more dangerous to the seller when the buyer gets lost and expects reality instead of illusion.
I mean, I suspect that the gender imbalance in "willing to pay for lewdness and smiles" is greater than the imbalance for "willing to sell lewdness and smiles"
but as always we should be wary using too much deduction on soft science topics
Sexual reproduction evolves convergently from the fusion of similar gametes (isogamy) to those of dissimilar gametes (anisogamy).
Sexual differentiation produces dimorphic sexual asymmetry, a binary mating system of two types. Males produce many small gametes, females produce few large gametes.
Factored by the expensive cost of selection, copulation, gestation, and rearing, and females are naturally inclined to be more selective.
In a sellers market where everyone wants to buy, humans mate assortatively.
I highly recommend ‘The Evolution of Insect Mating Systems’ (1983) by Randy Thornhill and John Alcock. The diversity of insects provide excellent insight into the evolution of sexual reproduction.
I bet this isn't even their decision. (Card processor is probably making them do this).
Returning money received fraudulently seems reasonable and unlikely to be challenged by content creators (whom you are presumably clawing it back from). A short "escrow" period to enable this seems unlikely to be challenged by content creators.
The problematic case for chargebacks are probably "all the other ones" that aren't demonstrable fraud.
There will be a lot of people abusing this system to essentially pirate porn - and I’m also unsure if only fans has the type of workforce to review every case
So people can pay for your content, look at it/screenshot it, and then refund it. I think content creators may have an issue with that, yeah.
This is my thinking as well. Why else would OF willingly limit their own revenue? I doubt it's due to sincere concern for customer well-being.
Support for arbitrarily high transactions might be a net negative for their revenue, if the chargeback rate is high enough.
I’ve been single for ten years after an engagement ended in her attempted suicide. OnlyFans is a controlled, safe form of sexual interaction for me that doesn’t risk a relationship going horribly wrong again.
I also pay a cuddlist to cuddle with me twice a month.
Also, OnlyFans seems like a more ethical way to consume porn than going through a tube site where you don’t know if the upload was consensual or if it was produced by an exploitative studio or whatever.
I make more than enough to cover my living expenses, be debt free and still save half my income. This is a small discretionary expense for me.
It's to feel a connection. Porn is free. Connection is not. Creators who sell a connection make the most money. It's the same reason why guys will donate to male Twitch streamers - they want to feel like they're best friends. The streamers feed this fantasy to keep the dollars rolling.
People are lonelier these days.
I don't care if they think I'm their friend. They're providing a service that I enjoy and I should pay for it, especially now when I have the money to do so and other people may not. If you could pay $5 a month for weekly episodes of your favorite TV show, I'm guessing most folks would?
I used to subscribe to Twitch streams of pros that would play the game with their subscribers. 5 bucks a month to play a game I love with a professional? Heck yes. Playing soccer with Messi would cost a ton more.
Slightly shameful plug: I wrote about Bella/OF in my most recent newsletter issue.
Second, OnlyFans much like Patreon, isn't just about nudes it is more about the perceived personal connection to the creator. You get the opportunity to message your favorite creator directly and get responses. Some people value that personal connection more than others.
The same reason people would want to pay for porn, I guess... the difference is that they get some kind of "exclusive" pornography. I see it has become a serious money making gig for some. Making $8000 is no small money for a lot of individuals. Definitely more than the average engineer salary in Europe.
Like a pro dom teaching civil engineering classes?
Unfortunately, the OnlyFans "creators" have also flocked to reddit and spam it relentlessly. So bad that quite a few subreddits have had to ban "sellers" who were drowning out the other users.
Weird situation for adult entrepreneurs.
IT work is transient and alienating too, but people do it because it pays the bills for their skills
The stigma from sex work being in a legal grey zone affects those who rely on the income to support themselves and their family.
Also I would be interested to know what other professions you consider "luxury service work" since I can't seem to find a proper definition readily.
By luxury service work, I mean something where you perform services for people with much higher than average disposable income. Basically think of all the bottom rung jobs in the most expensive parts of the most expensive cities.
We can fool ourselves and attribute actors and athletes success to hard-work. It has a bit of truth to it, but a beautiful woman getting thousands a month just for being hot and talking into a camera might be too blatantly unfair for us to ever view it without some stigma.
Lots of talk here by confused techbros thinking about how they can cash in on this goldmine.
They should read your comment.
Self improvement and self help (real or just promised) are big ways to make money in this area.
>Notice how anything like this will always be male owned.
I don't think it makes a difference to the individual creators whether the middle-man profiting from this is male or female. The creators don't get any better outcome either way.
In some ways, it feels like current content creators on OnlyFans are making the same complaints about Bella Thorne that certain communities were making about content creators on OnlyFans before.
And there ain't no shame in their game. If people want to give OnlyFans creators money for any reason, as long as the money is theirs to give, etc, that's between them. What I think of the transaction is immaterial. It's about as useful as the closet full of Lego sets I have.
And if people want to buy that content, why complain about the people providing it. No, it's not typically hard work. And let's all not pretend that it is. But. So what. Some people were just born wealthy. Some people just win the lottery. Or have some other windfall. Not all wealth is earned through hard work. That's just the way it is. I mean, look at all the people featured in the article. They're all attractive women.
And more power to them if they've found a way they don't have to work hard to earn themselves some money.
But it really feels like the current creators are complaining about Throne because she doesn't have to work as hard. Or that she's had automatic reach due to her celebrity status. That she doesn't even have to get nude to get this money.
And that's the complaints made about the majority of creators by the people who cannot leverage the platform like they can.
And it's not like the money sent to Thorne was going to affect the money sent to other creators. It's not like OnlyFans has $X a month to split between creators based on subscriptions. No, individuals choose to subscribe to specific creators. The people signed up to subscribe to Thorne weren't subscribing to OnlyFans because they like OnlyFans, they were signing up to OnlyFans to subscribe to Thorne. Take her away and they don't even sign up.
And the cap limits are another thing in this debacle. They're trying to put the blame for that on Thorne, but really, that's a move that was going to come sooner or later. OnlyFans needs the subscribers more than the creators. The content is pretty fungible in all honesty. So OnlyFans will take measures to make sure the bleed is as slow as possible.
On the other hand, I get why they're frustrated by all this. It can be difficult to watch someone waltz in and crush something you've been chipping away at for a while. It can be difficult to have the terms of a platform suddenly change under you and impact your income. Those are valid frustrations. I'm just not sure if it's a frustration that's actionable on their part. I think they just may have to suck this one up.
“She charges up to $40 for lingerie pictures and videos or for content that implies nudity; $165 for topless photos and $200 for nude images and videos.”
The internet is filled with tons of free images and videos. I can’t see the point. I guess the “item” being sold isn’t just the image/video but rather the “interaction” and maybe personalization.
People drop hundreds and thousands of dollars on in-game coins. There is a lot more money floating around than you realize.
Fools are easily separated from their money, but my ethics prevent me from taking advantage of those fools
Broadly speaking I have found many people aching for the smallest shred of sentimentality. This is what she's selling. The only amazing thing is just how little people will buy.
Overall it’s a good thing that the internet can provide the “long tail” for content when it used to be dominated by a few major players, often with big barriers to entry.
For example I’m happy to buy self-published tech books. Thorsten Ball’s “Writing an interpreter / compiler in Go” series comes to mind. Those books don’t see the light of day in the old model. His books are well written and original.
So if you have a niche and someone produces content, esp high quality content, then by all means support it. But saying someone’s name in a live stream, sending some nude photos, etc. doesn’t seem to have much original value.
If this is what someone's discretionary budget is allocated to, more power to them.
People want to show their gratitude. It's more relevant to the Twitch conversations. OF is basically all paid members where twitch, the ratio is probably 20:1 or worse, free to paid.
The people who are paying are doing so because they want to, not because they have to. That's one big difference between Twitch and Onlyfans.
I know several people that now have that to spend because they aren't taking public transit anymore and another gave up a $300/mo parking place in New York.
Now he's spending a bunch of the money he should be saving on OnlyFans, "Premium snapchats" and Fortnite.
Also I would guess poor people are more likely to lack intimate affection, so they are probably the most common profile.
They don't have the income, but they spend the money anyway.
What on earth! I guess I'm so out of touch with what some people are after on the internet.
I think the right thing to do would have been to refund those whom she defrauded with false advertising. If I understand the situation, she sold photos as one kind of content, but delivered something else in the end?
If I bought a bag of potatoes but it turned out to be charcoal when I opened it, I'd bring it back to the store for a refund or exchange.
If you have had a chance to work with the companies in the content scene, you would recognize the pattern. A couple of top tier accounts (head) account for the lion's share of hot content and hence monetization, the next level of accounts (tail) - dozens to hundreds - has some hot content and hence monetization but at a fraction of the previous tier. Finally the rest of the accounts have nearly no hot content and hence no monetization (long tail).
From an outside perspective based strictly on the content itself it is very difficult to determine the difference between tail and long tail. It is even unclear the difference between some of the long-tail and the head.
>Ms Michelle has 550 fans and makes $8,000 a month, charging a $30 subscription fee to users. She also relies on tips ranging from $5-$200 for pay-per-view photos, videos and text messages.
>She says her OnlyFans work is the only way she can support her family due to the pandemic, and fears many other content creators will struggle to make ends meet going forward.
Really? There's always working at Walmart, Target or even collecting an income from Patreon?
Depending on where this person lives, yes that absolutely could be scraping by. Even more so if they have a family member who needs special care, or they are paying for someone's education.
In all honesty, Kudos to them for milking those crazy amount of money off the platform (and the people).
But in all seriousness: 1. one can't seriously believe that easy money will always be this easy and abundant 2. competition drives the prices down and fighting the stigma on sex workers drives the competition up.
I'm not being judgemental or anything, it's just that the whole argument does not make sense, at all.
And btw as soon as something stops being a subculture, people like Bella Thorne will start showing up. It's sad, but happens in every space/environment.
Yes, but that totally misses the point. The problem is that the pictures (presumably) weren't as advertised and so OnlyFans lowered the price ceiling for everyone to reduce future losses. The complaint isn't that people don't pay, but that the plattform stopped allowing high paid work.
And in all honesty, it is a bad way to handle the situation. Pulling posts with a high number of complaints, holding the money for a few days or only setting a limit for new accounts would've been a superior solution by far, at least in my opinion.
Right, that's my confusion too. Why not just hold creator revenue a bit longer and then make chargebacks during that period their liability?
as with all black market activities, like the oldest profession, the money is always easy and abundant. It's always there. But restricting it consolidates the power away from the actual workers to an intermediary, historically this has been violent male pimps.
They make things easy for you but when you disagree with the way they run things you're often left sol. And the cost to exit the platform is much higher now.
What any monetisation platform can also give to them, they are more than able to take it away.
Since it's their platform, they can do what they like. Best to just build your following there and move out and run your own show while you can.
Setting up and maintaining your own site isn't cheap either, and you still need a payment processor. Most of those don't allow adult content, and for the ones that do, 20% is pretty standard.
It's this. Also someone else mentioned that payment processing is a potential issue when you're selling sex.
OnlyFans only requires you to sign up.
You could ask why people on YouTube don't hire web companies to set up their own site.
Then I got older and read accounts of sex workers trafficked to European countries where prostitution is legal I realised that some (but not all) sex workers are actually participating in "legal" transactions under duress. In my mind that invalidates the necessary consent required when the activity involves sex work of some kind, making it unethical from the buyer to acquire such a service despite it being legal locally. While trafficking is of course still illegal, I am unclear about the laws protecting trafficking victims from their "buyers" in non-consenting transactions.
Since it is practically impossible to confirm if a given sex worker is participating under duress or not, especially when it occurs "remotely" as in this OnlyFans situation, I would say it is always unethical to purchase such services.
In addition, what I would consider "under duress" is fairly broad, not only under threat of violence from traffickers, but also including economic duress where an individual feels that it is the only way to earn an income to put food on the table. In this vein, I would consider sex tourism to poorer countries a form of exploitation and thus unethical, even though one could argue the individuals from the poorer countries selling such services do so "willingly".
This article writes that one of these women feels that she must engage in sex work through OnlyFans because it is "the only way she can support her family...". It leaves a bad taste as I would not consider that she is participating in the transaction without duress, and thus actually consenting in the transaction. Would you be okay with it if you knew that the woman you were buying lingerie pictures "had" to do it? How would that not be a form of exploitation?
However, one can extend this argument to any type of work. "She says her _____ work is the only way she can support her family...", replace with an arbitrary line of work and activity (woodcutting/marketing/basketweaving). Is there any thing that makes sex work special (apart from some puritanical opinion which are not actually applicable), that would make such a transaction inherently more unethical than say being forced to work at McDonalds because it's the only way to make ends meet? Why would the latter more "ethical" than the former, when an individual is still "forced" to sell their labor to survive, what ever form that labor is?
Doesn't that mean pretty much all labor then?
I think my biggest counter argument to your otherwise excellent post is that I am not convinced that prohibition actually fixes the problem you're talking about. We all agree that alcoholism is bad, but making it illegal didn't actually do anything to stop it.
Applying this kind of blanket rule leads to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions. Can you verify that the people assembling the very device you wrote this post on aren't under similar amounts of duress as you clutch your pearls over in this comment?
> Since it is practically impossible to confirm if a given sex worker is participating under duress or not, especially when it occurs "remotely" as in this OnlyFans situation, I would say it is always unethical to purchase such services
I agree that ethics and law do not coincide in all circumstances, and sometimes what is lawful may not necessarily be ethical. However, in the situation you described, prudence is what you should aim at, and understanding where and how trafficking can arise in your area or community should be your priority. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater by demonizing sex work entirely because of its susceptibility to trafficking is not only extreme, but risks sacrificing people's freedom to choose their work based on events that they cannot possibly control.
This topic is much more complex than that, but that's one side of it at least.
But some reports say OnlyFans has been planning these changes for some time - and by rolling them out now, they can make Bella Thorne take the heat instead of taking it themselves.
The fallout from this is not unexpected, and neither is the Schadenfreude from it.
I encourage anyone perplexed by how Bella supports herself when there is no scarcity on the Internet to pornography to check out Twitch's Just Chatting category. Find a thumb of an attractive woman and click into her stream.
You will find many viewers who act as though they have a personal relationship with a streamer. People respond in chat as though they are having a conversation with the streamer. People donate (sometimes $10+) just to have their message read on stream.
Most disconcerting, you will find a non-negligible amount of people who are watching the stream + insulting the streamer in chat. These are people taking time out of their day to participate in targeted, anonymous hate.
Probably the most famous example.
althought im sure people like that do exist, maybe not to that extent, this particular case isnt real.
source of the comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/8t6yrp/stre...
If only more people could see this and come to their own conclusions or help them escape supporting OnlyFans, or whatever alternative.
Internet, man.
He seems genuinely upset.
Online or offline hate is part and parcel of any public performance, be it jesus on the streets of jerusalem or a girl on twitch. There is really no way to have one without the other unless you remove the communication channel.