I don't know exactly how they did it, but OF was/is unique in that the adult content is their entire business model.

When your company is at risk of being essentially forcefully dissolved, you're gonna be desperate. I was fully expecting them to tell Visa to fuck off and just switch to a different payment processor, because that's more economically viable than complying with Visa.

Maybe they threatened Visa with legal action and Visa felt that it was too risky, lest they lose their entire censorship operation. Just speculation.

I'm guessing they were willing to accept conditions such as verification of performers and censorship of unwanted adult content. OnlyFans has the scale to not be fatally affected by these costs of operation. They can present themselves as a cleaner alternative to an unregulated website.

I'm guessing shady back office deals with the executives took place, or at least I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

They previously were banned (or maybe it was threatened to be banned) by the payment processors, then suddenly it went away.

> How did that pan out?

OnlyFans has an insane amount of rules about what's allowed or not. And suspends and bans performers left and right for the slightest BS complaint (apparently usually from a competitor to that performer). That's how it panned out.

That must not be comfortable for OF because this is the kind of insanity that will make every performer keep looking for plausible alternate intermediaries so as to ditch OF. OF makes it because they are by far the largest source of traffic for performers.

It's easy: https://simplebeen.com/onlyfans-statistics/ OnlyFans is so big in the US and so widely used in the US (94 million active accounts) which is about 28% of the population (with the caveat that some people might have multiple accounts). It's too big to fail. The American economy will fail and the government needs to bail it and nationalize it as a public goods service. /s

It's either that or shady backroom deals with Visa.