Comment by 52358 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 52358 | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder how many people here are aware of Snapchat's thriving underground OnlyFans-like ecosystem. I also wonder how much of that is driving Snap's user metrics.

As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.

The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.

As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.

I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.

The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.

What I don't get is why Snap never tried to build a good product around that and give creators (uhmm) a good way to monetize their profiles. This seems like such an obvious thing to do to me. Why would you give up on that usage and allow it to move to OnlyFans and other platforms if you already have it? And even more, penalize your audience for such practice. And same question to Instagram team (I left the company a while back so don't know the current thinking). If anybody with insider knowledge can comment even top-level, would be much appreciated.

Are there any good examples of product that maintains popularity within youth / teen markets while enabling monetisation of adult content?

It seems near an impossibility.

From a product perspective it would be possible, tho it’d be playing with fire. Very different when young people see adult content and you ban it vs they see the adult content you condone but you didn’t intend them to reach. (And they will try to).

But from the perception perspective, even harder. When adults (some parents) see snap as an adult entertainment product, they are not going to want kids using it. Even if there’s some suitable product barrier between the audiences.

I have kids and I fully agree with your analysis. You do not want a 10 year old to be exposed to pornographic content.

Kids are going to be exposed anyway but better to have exposure at a time where theyhave the maturity to handle it.

Education takes time and is hard. It is very nice as parent to know that my kids have some relatively safe social apps.

The status quo is girls (or their marketing teams), randomly "quick add" profiles, exposing minors to their teases and adult content.

You're pretty much guaranteed to see unsolicited prn in sc these days. Just create a fresh account and wait for the random friend requests.

> Are there any good examples of product that maintains popularity within youth / teen markets while enabling monetisation of adult content?

The Internet.

Printed media.

I was thinking more specifically than those.

But to your point, google, ddg & reddit are examples that enable both adult and non-adult content to co-exist.

Reddit being a better example of a product that’s targeted to a younger demographic, tho far from exclusively.

Because they are a public company and institutional shareholders wouldn't let them.

Before going public they wouldn't have been able to pass it by VCs already invested or raise any more capital. OnlyFans has this problem.

Even if they had offered it early they would have struggled the same way OnlyFans did recently over payments, and with no way to police it on their technology probably would have been embattled with media and public perception way worse.

Banks, investors and other companies don't want to deal with Pornography and sex workers despite the massive proliferation online.

They wouldn't have been able to have all their partnerships, generate revenue from other sources or have apps either.

My guess is they feared it would pollute the brand. SNAP's key demo is high school and college aged kids.

Probably because being open about allowing adult content will risk advertisers on the rest of the platform and the loss of those advertisers might outweigh the revenue from OnlyFans type profiles.

Apple does not allow adult content on the app store. For example, OnlyFans does not have an iOS app as a result. If Snap were to openly embrace adult content, they could risk getting booted from the app store.

Twitter and Reddit (and third party clients like Apollo) are allowed to bypass this.

Is this why Tinder is now flooded with girls who only have their snap in their bio (or try and get you to snap asap?)

Anything that tries to get you immediately out of a platform is very likely spam.

> I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays

Yeah It just disspeared out my life. Pretty sure its for youngens now. But, I did see it moving in a weird direction before deleting my account

I tried to use their filters for Zoom / Teambuildings (yes, It's tacky, I know) but had to realize that their filter discovery just doesn't work on the MacOS (at least)

Some other things to mention: the premium content is almost exclusively in the form of stories, which disappear after 24 hours of course. Sometimes creators offer extra services at an additional fee or if you buy a lifetime membership or whatnot (duck/face rates, custom photos/videos, phone calls, etc), all of which go through the Snap app. Some even have a menu which they re-post on their stories daily ($20 for a custom 3 minute video, $10 for a 5 minute phone call, etc, etc). Sometimes these are also sold as "packages". Photo/video archives in the form of links to folders on mega.nz and similar websites are other assets commonly sold this way.

It's kind of still amusing to me that Snapchat ever moved beyond being a niche platform like that. Heck, I might still have an account, but the only reason I ever did was around 2012 or so when I first divorced and started seeing women again, they offered to send nudes, but only via Snapchat. What other purpose could a service that let you send disappearing pictures serve? It was clearly for sending nudes. Watching them become a VC darling and totally rebrand to something for kids was surreal.

I'm kind of sad at your scenario, though. Receiving pictures from someone I actually got to meet and go on dates with was quite a bit more personal and fulfilling than subscribing to a mass semi-public feed from a professional adult performer. Pros always have to ruin everything.

I haven't paid attention to Snapchat at all because my assumption was that the OnlyFans type ecosystem made up the majority of the platform's content.

I assume half of Reddit is only fans type content too.

I would put it at ~1% of Reddit's total content pool.

You can't monetise content so all people do is promote their OnlyFans pages.

And Reddit has a lot of content that is city/region specific that most people would never see.

Installed it for the first time after ... 5 years?

The top suggested channels were about 80% porn.

The avatars of the people there did not look over 18.

I still don't understand how onlyfans succeeds as a product when there is pornhub etc...someone explain this to me.

Interesting question. The answer is because people pay to have quasisocial relationships with the OnlyFans providers. On other sites with just videos, you don't get that same feeling.

Basically, people are lonely and will pay to feel seen, heard, or loved.

If anything sites like PH seem to be advertising venues for things like OnlyFans, cam sites and even Snapchat profiles.

Is your argument that there is enough free random porn to make it not worth paying for OnlyFans?

The reason I would pay for OnlyFans content, if I could afford it, is that there are specific creators on there that I find particularly attractive, either physically or personality-wise, and I would love to help fund their lifestyle.

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