Apparently it's not just OnlyFans and GoFundMe that like punching themselves in the nads. Mind boggling how these businesses make these decisions. Even if the strategy is to pivot, bungling the PR on this scale is just awful.
Right now, if I search for “Lois van Baarle” on Google I see her Twitter account and then a bunch of YouTube hits. I have to add "Vimeo" to the query before I see a single hit from her preferred platform before the third page of results.
[0]https://www.inputmag.com/features/rise-and-ruin-of-couchsurf...
Additionally, the censorship debate started discussions in Europe to create an European-based, discrimination-free payment network [2] - and that would have been a bigger threat to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly's profits than the risk of angering a bunch of Evangelical nutcases in the US.
Meanwhile as for Pornhub, they still only have Bitcoin, Ethereum and shitcoins, and IIRC direct bank wire transfers as payment method.
[1]: https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/
[2]: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-payments-initi...
You can choose to ignore that, but to say that it was all the evil american evangelists boogeyman is just non sense. It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society. And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
This is all so widely documented that I just really fail to see how you got to that conclusion.
I won't say PornHub isn't without issues. But: Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have also been accused of the very same things and yet no one is calling for their ban.
> NYT isn't exactly known to be a source of evangelical propaganda/zeal
The particular author - Nick Kristof - is [1].
> And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
No one is ignoring that. The answer isn't to ban porn sites or prostitution, the answer is to go after the abusers directly, to establish a culture of holding people accountable.
> Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Yeah, and why is that? Because again of a campaign driven by anti-sex-work activists and politicians and AGs wanting an easy target for political gain [2], timed together with the passing of FOSTA/SESTA, yet another campaign by the same groups [3]. To this day, the government wasn't able to hold trial against the people behind Backpage, further giving evidence to the fact that the situation isn't as clear as the abolitionists painted it.
> Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Because online porn (in contrast to physical media) has incredibly high fraud rates - from legitimately stolen credit cards that have been used to buy premium accounts over men having their purchases found out by their wives and attempting to deflect by saying their card details got stole to clear cases of "post-nut regret" aka chargeback fraud.
> It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society.
You correctly identified me being an European. And you can hardly blaming us for our beliefs when you managed to elect an Evangelical nutcase to Vice President and the GQP is has been running efforts wherever they can to screw over sex workers, transgender and non-heterosexual people wherever the fuck they can.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...
[2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/backpage-is-bad-banning-it-wou...
[3]: https://whyy.org/segments/fosta-sesta-was-supposed-to-thwart...
By the way I'm not American, but please it's hilarious to see europeans giving lessons about transgender rights, homophobia or racism. Let's ignore the fact that in most of Europe, trans people have way less rights/recognition, there are still debates around gay marriage and gay adoption, abortion laws are usually more draconian than even in Texas & the German state literally has a religious tax. Racism is also so ingrained that you get countries like France with 20-40% voting for a literal neo nazi party for decades now, and hatred against Roma peoples is so accepted and "natural" that it's basically a national sport.
The only difference is that in the US, there's actually a public debate around those issues, while in Europe it's much more accepted. So while I don't want to bash on europe your last paragraph does not reflect reality.
From a development cost perspective, moving into non-adult content would just require a page reskin and a domain name purchase. It would all be advertising.
I doubt OnlyFans can pivot - they'd just be competing with patreon, which i dont think they will win if so. The OnlyFan niche is quite strong, and they would be stupid to pivot now. Case in point - the words "onlyfan" has become a verbage like google has.