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I'm curious how much this may have impacted their users regardless. I imagine that a lot of people learned that relying on a single platform is dangerous and how important it is to diversify your online profile. I don't think people will trust Onlyfans anymore.

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Network effects will always win, regardless of the trustworthiness of the platform.

As demonstrated time and again by Facebook.

And youtube. Creators constantly want to move away from youtube with it's content-id with incredibly slow appeals process that makes most types of fair use nearly impossible, it's demonetization that intransparently makes your videos unprofitable because you said the wrong word or made the wrong sound, the blatant favoritism when it comes to the "trending" page, etc.

But the viewers are on youtube, and network effects keep the viewers from switching. So there's just a graveyard of failed youtube alternatives.

That's true, until the viewer profile change or disappear, which happens very, very slowly, but it happens anyway. It happened several times in history. Nothing lasts forever.

I think streaming video is a different beast, because the market is littered with loss leaders. It's hard for content creators to switch to another platform when the only profitable ones are subscription based (and not competitive).

Even Youtube, for all its users and being part of an existing advertising company, struggles to break even (reportedly).

Video is so mind blowingly huge compared to everything else. A single youtube video can be multiple gb if you view the 4k60fps version. While making an alternative reddit or twitter is relatively trivial server cost wise.

The part that you are missing is that all of alternatives to YouTube pay creators little or no ad money and have far worse search engine/discoverability. If a creator is getting demonetized on youtube, moving to a platform with no monetization would not solve their problem.

And sooner or later, any platform that becomes popular would have to implement a content ID system and and have to deal with ban/demonetization waves every time Twitter/journalists discover a new type of offensive content on the platform.

There have been plenty of (mostly short-lived) competitors that paid out more per view than YouTube. But that's obviously meaningless if there are barely any viewers on the platform.

I agree that content ID is a necessary system in principle. Not legally necessary, but it's a system that solves real problems YouTube had before its existence. The problems with it are largely around YouTube heavily favoring recent content, while simultaneously having a support that takes weeks to even look at your case if you can't raise a twitter storm. They are trying to completely automate a problem that's full of subtlety and rife with abuse, and then don't give you any way to resolve it when it goes wrong. Other platforms don't have to choose the same path

As a viewer, I would prefer watching content on other platforms. Problem is: there's none. Someone will mention PeerTube, but no... It doesn't work as well, not easy to navigate. The whole federation thing makes it harder to find content on a platform that already doesn't have most of the well known creators.

This is why trust busting of monopoly social media platforms is so crucially important.

What non-trust related network effects work in OnlyFans' favour?

By network effects it's meant that all the buyers will go to OnlyFans because all the sellers are there, and all the sellers will stay there because that's where all the buyers are.

I don't see how trust is directly related to that, it's a competing concern.

Yeah but it's a case of how much effort it takes to post to multiple platforms?

I wonder if there could be a meta-platform which aggregates feedback, cross posts automatically, etc.

It differs from Facebook because the kind of interaction assymetry.

One of the advice that a popular youtube said is to start a newsletter, which is how you own your audience, as opposed to being at the mercy of the youtube algorithm.

I thought this was a good advice to take for a long while before a youtuber mentioned it, but I wasn't a content creator.

I think it's a good idea to have your own website as well.

This advice is older than YouTube. It was repeated endlessly back when bloggers were chasing views trading blows with response posts. The original QRT dunk.

Exactly. This is the method for being able to say you predicted 100% of the stock moves over the last year - while getting endorsements from people who followed your recommendations.

Send out A/B newsletters. Group A gets a version which says a stock will go down. The B group's newsletter says the same stock will go up. Rinse and repeat. You are guaranteed to have a path to victory...

In other words, don't believe everything you read or watch, even if it is from a newsletter or youtube account with 100% success.

That’s definitely good advice for an established content creator who has an audience but it doesn’t solve the problem of reach. If I start a newsletter today I have no subscribers. How do I find them? If it’s an innocuous topic I’d probably start by sending my newsletter to friends and family and by posting links on social media. For the typical OF creator that isn’t really an option. Most links to pornographic content hosted on an unknown site are assumed to be spam or a scam.

There's a thousand niches on AD (After Dark) Twitter. A lot of accounts have short videos, then link to an OnlyFans page for longer videos. I don't know how effective it is.

That's decreasingly a risk you can avoid, whether you are an only fans user/model/entertainer (what's the OF equivalent of a youtuber?) or OnlyFans itself.

It's risky to be dependant on an App store, cloud computing platform, social media platform, payment processor, etc. They might change their rules, ban you over a rumour, or just quietly change their recommendation or advertising algorithms to exclude you. There aren't a lot of substitutes, and even if there were, switching can mean leaving behind users.

OTOH, you have no choice. All the opportunities are on these platforms, not just risks.

To be a youtuber, you need to be on youtube. Diversifying to other platforms is doing stuff other than being a youtuber is hard. You can't just take your users, revenue model and such with you. You could try also doing IG or OF, but in the same sense that you can also practice law on the side. Sure, it gives you security, but not in a portfolio kind of a sense.

OnlyFans proved the market. Now it needs competition.

But all actors are at the mercy of a few payment providers and their regulators.

I believe a lot of the sex workers expected this to happen at some point. Tumblr burned them when they got bought. So they might have some diversification, but their main focus has been OnlyFans. That was the platform that gave the best ROI.

There's a lot of upstart clones that are using their own cryptocurrencies. Not sure how much they'll fare though now with OF retracting their decision.

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