I don't get why that's a problem? They already built their platform, it works, they're the gold standard and they have a massive paying userbase! Why do they need VC money? Why would you want to dilute your stock rather than just build with your already existing, sizeable revenue stream?
Adult content hosting sites face some unique (read expensive) challenges relating to both scale and content moderation. It's not like you can just run videos through a nudity detector to stop your servers from accidentally hosting terabytes of kiddie porn.
But I don't think that there's much direct competition to OnlyFans, or that there is a market which is easy to capture by copycatting them.
Hence, they can afford to not take any investment. This is similar to how GitHub operated and grew for the first few years.
Yahoo may very well be the single dumbest major tech company in history.
Just…blunder after blunder after shitty decision. Watching its history is almost the definition of seeing a slow motion train wreck. It’s almost impressive.
With regards to Tumblr - I can’t imagine what potential business decision could’ve been worth what they had to know was suicide. Why make the acquisition and then kill your user base? It’s not like they didn’t know. That’s probably one of the single biggest wastes of $1b I’ve seen. Why buy it to knowingly, fully intentionally, throw it down the toilet? So baffling.
I posit this as an explanation. I think "go big or go home" is a terrible mindset.