The IT Nerd

OnlyFans has dropped their plans to ban pornography from its service, less than a week after announcing that they were banning porn. Besides the link above, the company announced this on Twitter:

The cynic in me says that they figured out that their creators would flee the platform and they would be in deep trouble. Just like Tumblr when they banned porn. Thus they had to do an about face on this. The thing is, a lot of their creators have already left the platform and I don’t see them coming back. Thus OnlyFans may have already shot themselves in the foot.

OnlyFans has announce that it is banning porn. This is to protect its partnerships with banks and payment providers who are gun-shy about dealing with porn companies, or companies perceived to be porn companies. And it’s also meant to get over the fact that OnlyFans is struggling to raise new funding as investors are understandably gun-shy about investing in porn.

The platform will still allow creators to post nude photos and videos, but not any “sexually explicit conduct.” The change goes into effect starting in October.

Here’s the thing. Now that this announcement is out there, creators on OnlyFans will flee the platform en masse. I say that because we saw this happen with Tumblr which was worth a lot of money because of porn. They were then sold by Yahoo to Verizon for a pile of money, who then banned porn. As a result of that people abandoned the platform and it was eventually sold to Automatic who paid cents on the dollar for what was left of it. Which wasn’t a lot.

So OnlyFans might be hoping that this plays out differently. But to be honest, I can’t see it. I think that OnlyFans is doomed. And they themselves will be responsible for their own demise.