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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

If I were to guess it would be that to those on the inside it is obvious where the PPV porn numbers top out at in terms of near-future revenue and that these numbers are not sufficient to justify the valuation growth that they want to see. Profitable is nice, but if you want to build a unicorn you have to aim for bigger profits and lower risk than what the current OnlyFans model provides.

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I really dislike this entire mentality so much. At what point did we go from a place where you have a diverse set of companies making good revenues and profits and serve their audiences well to this crappy model of everyone trying to be the next Instagram.

Adult content creators are probably going to get booted off at some point for 'ad-friendliness' despite the fact that they helped build most of it.

On the Internet, you're either growing or dying.

Do we have even a single example of an Internet company that has been constant and consistently profitable over 10 years?

Tarsnap, maybe?

Basecamp

Who seem to have recently had a meltdown and compensation seems to be part of it.

Yeah, a meltdown in the Twitter virtue signaling bubble.

Sorry, people with mortgages and children don't quit jobs due to "signaling".

They only quit jobs when they've got the alternative lined up. And they change jobs because the compensation doesn't outweigh the crap.

When a big chunk of your company suddenly walks, that's either high crap or low compensation. And it's been ongoing because they've had time to plan their exit as a group.

The "signaling" just gave them a nice excuse.

There are plenty of such sites. You don't hear about them in the Web Dev/Startup bubble because they're just getting on with life and their business model, not open-sourcing the latest JavaScript framework du jour.

Craigslist.

Okay, that's fair, even if it's not what I intended.

That probably counts as "constant" because they saturated the market completely.

I was more interested in companies that were something like "$25 million per year for the last 10-15 years and we're doing just fine thanks."

If they did this they will end up like tumblr: in the oblivion. They have the luck to be profitable, differently from tumblr. Them pivoting to non porn would be a choice, not a necessity like tumblr

If I were them I would spin off the adult stuff into a sub-brand. It can be the same technology, administration, ops, everything. Seems easier than strangling the goose that lays golden eggs.

But "the adult stuff" is their brand. The fact that you can use the service for anything is more of a sidenote. The question "do you have an onlyfans?" implies "adult stuff".

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