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I don’t think 70% is unreasonably high for a fully-featured agency doing everything from marketing, management, etc.

The value-add in this industry is not the model - there are plenty of beautiful women willing to take nudes in the world. The hard part is actually finding and extracting money from paying customers - cross-promoting with other models, spamming a million posts on every nsfw subreddit, having a human carefully determine how best talk to a customer and entice them into paying, etc.

Traditional porn studios of course take this farther - models just show up and act, and the studio pays for cameramen, editors, websites, marketing, promotion, distribution, etc. This is basically a smaller scale version of a porn studio, where now the actor is also the director and camera operator (although I would guess the largest accounts will have professional editors and the like) but all the other work is offloaded onto an agency.

I can easily imagine a Russian/Ukrainian model that doesn’t even speak a word of English (the traditional low-cost labour for the industry) using one of these agencies and making an order of magnitude more money after a 70% cut than they otherwise would.

The balance here is on who’s driving the value. Is the model special in some way such that they can draw large amounts of paying customers with little effort? Then they will accrue to themselves most of the profit in the industry. Otherwise it’s the people doing the marketing work that make the most money.

It is not at all unlike a funding round.

Do you give up X % of your business for a cash injection or go it alone? With the cash it could be a billion $ company, without it just a side gig worth -$'s.

It seems like the chatters, not the models, who aren’t getting a fair cut.

Chatters are even more expendable. They don't even have to have a looks, only reasonably decent typing/writing skill. I wonder what it will take to replace them with GPTish ML model?

> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here

Oh, but there is plenty of platonic relationships with camgirls, streamers and such. It can reach levels of delusion that you wouldn't believe.

For the models it is still only a business relationship, except in very rare cases. By the same token, prostitution can also be a meaningful personal relationship, as shown in the movie Pretty Woman.

as shown in the documentary Pretty Woman

I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.

As your sibling commented mentioned, even if they attempt to treat it as a business relationship, not all people can handle it. The mental toll of receiving affection and then basically fake reciprocating it is hard, and not everybody can take it.

> movie Pretty Woman.

You mean Pygmalion?

I don't know anyone on OnlyFans, but I know a few women who do "Just Chatting" Twitch streams and the psychological toll on them is huge. Having to give people constant attention, answer every question or at least acknowledge it, and provide a sort of faux-friendship in exchange for money is a really strange arrangement. Just yesterday a long-term supporter of one woman I know "confessed their love" to her, and will probably unsubscribe because she won't reciprocate.

Another interesting but sad fact is that a lot of those streamers have significant others, but they hide it from the audience because they believe they'll get more engagement.

Sure the same thing might happen in regular businesses, but the interactions are either shorter (eg cashier) or at least it's acknowledged as being entirely professional.

To be fair if they’re leading people on because it gets more engagement/money they really can’t expect it to be stress free. There’s always a choice to be made.

Yes, I completely agree. Most people know that it comes with the territory.

Why wouldn't the person reciprocate? I never would have imagined that emotional honesty exists in that type of relationship. Aren't people paying for the relationship?

Did you read the first paragraph? I’m talking about a Twitch streamer. People aren’t “paying for relationships”, they’re subscribing to get rid of ads and support the streamer, even though some expect a bit more.

The streamer won’t reciprocate because it is a random unknown person coming on a text chat claiming they’re in love with them. I don’t think this ever worked ever, but if you need further proof, she told me for a fact she won’t reciprocate.

> Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video

price discrimination is good!

For the rest of it, banning porn is probably a losing battle, but surely we can make fraud illegal, like passing yourself off as someone else.

For the rest of the what-ifs, do nothing, or call the police. I don't think pornographers should have a special duty to act over a shopkeeper or bus driver.

Price discrimination is only good as long as rich people are paying more. But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less.

> But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less.

Ah, so it's the rich people driving all those sensible cars with the exact practical functionality as the higher end models

People engaging in conspicuous consumption are not trying to save money.

A lot can change over a decades time. I hope and believe that porn will eventually be a lot more restricted than it is today, as the societal downsides become more and more apparent.

While ubiquitous access porn is relatively new (I think) with printed magazines and now the internet, one still has a great reference from something much older - prostitution. One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn. A lot of progressive nations these days (citation needed) are aiming to regulate and make prostitution safer, not outright ban it. Now, aiming and succeeding are different things, I admit.

Society DID recognize it caused problems and basically banned it everywhere (or at least made it frowned upon).

It's starting to look like removing some of the sexual morals that societies had used for hundreds of years is a classic Chesterton's fence style problem. Progressives didn't understand the good effects of some puritan policies and decided to throw it all out because it got in the way of them feeling good right now.

Sure there was some utility gained from those rules, but then we looked at them and the cost-benefit analysis is pretty clearly against them.

Limiting personal freedoms to satisfy old religious beliefs (some of which used to serve useful purposes) makes very little sense nowadays, especially that we have much much much better ways to get much better outcomes with regards to those purposes. (Eg. avoiding genetic defects due to incest, keeping communities growing to have enough people to replace those who are lost due to famines, disease, war, accidents.)

The cost benefit analysis can take generations and is still ongoing.

Cultures that have these rules and restrictions seem to be growing via positive birth rates while cultures that dont are stagnating and not growing and seem to be actively committing cultural suicide. So its not obvious to me which path evolutionary processes will choose to win out in the long run.

I'm not against natalism, but simply looking at the size of a culture says very little about it.

>One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn.

These two things are hugely different. Kids can and do regularly begin viewing porn right at puberty. There was never such easy access to sexual simulation even with prostitutes. You also cannot photoshop a real life prostitute, or browse around for the most attractive one in the world. Every additional prostitute you are with is an extra price, whereas each additional porn star is free; it naturally leads to needing huge amounts of stimulation that's incredibly hard to get in real life unless you own a harem. And even then if you're into the really hard-core stuff you'd have a hard time finding willing participants.

Porn and prostitution are totally different

MYOB and leave my porn alone.

> societal downsides become more and more apparent

not sure, but in the greater picture of overpopulation, porn seems to be a cheap and effective measure compared to medical/physical alternatives.

I guess when your benchmark is genocide, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

wouldn't call it genocide because it is not a selective measure. but yea, "preventing births" does qualify

I meant to say that the phrase “medical/physical alternatives” in the context you used it, means genocide.

Or maybe just…free vasectomies? or even free condoms.

as i tried to explain: it does not

At the slightest hint of coercion toward those measures, it’s genocide. Even peer pressure. Be sure not to do that.

To be clear, the word you're looking for is "eugenics".

>in the greater picture of overpopulation

Source that we are overpopulated? We can shrink the population and still pollute irresponsibly. In the past when the population was smaller we certainly managed to ruin plenty. And we aren't running out of land or food either.

Define ‘porn’. Are we banning romance novels and YouTube ASMR streams here?

Let's start with making hardcore SM-style porn inaccessible to kids and teens.

The thing with laws is that it doesn't matter where they "start"; it matters where they end. Open-ended laws are ripe for abuse, scope creep and selective enforcement.

These "downsides" are mostly the pseudo-scientific imaginings of feminists and redpill conservatives. There's very little evidence that porn harms anyone so long as it features consenting adults - despite internet forums incessantly repeating the opposite. It's a classic case of people believing something because they heard it repeated over and over.

Negotiating different rates for a product is just price discrimination (with negotiation added in). There's nothing remotely unethical about that.

> The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!).

It's an open market without anything even remotely resembling a monopoly, where all parties involved are professional and can relatively easy exit a contract they find unfair.

>and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic.

So then what it's ok to take advantage and scam them ??? WTF ...

What scam? These are all upfront deals. Content is actually delivered.

"impersonating the women in conversations with their subscribers"

Is the idea that since the subscribers should know that it isn't the model that it doesn't matter that it isn't the model?

That's a bit of a strange situation. I can't get angry about something like this.

On one hand, sure, the customer paid to talk to a specific model, and sure, scamming is wrong. On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. A service is definitely being provided, no harm done, just like "sending a post asking for an autograph" as someone below described.

> On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them.

Do you know that for a fact? It's hard for me to understand the minds of these subscribers, but surely, if they're so invested in one particular model, of course it would matter to them.

I do know some people working in a similar line of work, Twitch "Just Chatting" streamers, where they basically sell "attention". They're not trained to do this kind of conversation, so there is a mental toll that comes with giving emotional attention to someone that's at best a stranger, unless they learn compartmentalisation. It can be very artificial, since they can be tired and not all that interested in the customers stories.

It is also hard for me to understand their mind, but I know several cases of people who claimed to have fallen in love with the streamers. Even on small channels that can be a weekly occurrence.

So yeah, it does matter for these types of buyers, and it would crush their world if they knew it was a bot, but the end result is kinda the same, because streamers/models aren't interested in them.

I don't think you can just say the customers know that everything is artificial and completely staged. Sometimes there are genuine parasocial relationships going on, especially with particularly vulnerable and lonely people who would pay for this. And what they're paying for is an interaction with that particular person, not someone pretending to be that person. Would you assert that the same service is being provided if it was a chatbot?

In practice, yes. It would be the same end result for both: one person not caring and the other caring too much.

But you're right: the parasocial relationship makes it different, and it is indeed fraud.

If a friend did that to me I would also get angry too. But on the other hand, I would probably figure out if a friend of mine ever does it.

If it doesn't matter why not make it visible ?

Instead of : "The only time he ever has to ask the couple for anything is when a subscriber refuses to pay for content without receiving video confirmation that he’s really talking to Dani" ...

It does matter to the customer of course, like I said, fraud is wrong.

But in practice it doesn't matter: even with a real chat, it's still one people getting their hopes up and another not caring and only doing it for the money.

I mean fraud is fraud even if there's "no harm done". I don't particularly care for this industry but if it exists it should be run legally

Well, that's why I said "scamming is wrong". Maybe I should revert the order of phrases, because people seem to forget I said the first sentence.

From https://onlyfans.com/about.html Mission : "The site is inclusive of artists and content creators from all genres and allows them to monetize their content while developing authentic relationships with their fanbase".

Apparently we define "authentic relationship" differently. I think it's quite explicit in the article that the targets do not want just "content" ...

I would expect the business to be less profitable if the representant were to identify themself even with just an alias, no ?

> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here, except a business relationship.

This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then.

> and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic.

Given global wage inequality, is it really? I'd expect many of them to be the equivalent of the famed "chinese gold farmers".

>This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then.

The business transaction there was "I'll support you if you give me an heir." Infidelity is a clear breach of that fucked up transaction, which is why it was a big deal. Not really similar to buying a video online.