Explaining the context of the current OnlyFans changes, and the reasons for real-life pornography being removed from websites
For those who have not yet seen the news, OnlyFans — a subscription website known almost primarily for its use by sex workers and adult models — is banning sexually explicit content from October.
You may recall other (relatively recent) events like this, such as PornHub’s purge of non-verified content, its removal from payment providers, and Tumblr’s infamous fall from relevance after banning adult content.
So, why does this happen? Who is to blame? I have been keeping tabs on this topic for a long time, so I will explain it as best I can below.
I’d also direct readers to this Twitter thread by Post-Culture Review, as it is an excellent explanation of this issue and the more specific causes of it. My article is intended to be more abstract.
Payment Providers
Websites such as PornHub, OnlyFans and others are only able to operate because payment providers agree to let their users make payments via their systems. As a result, if payment providers refuse to let you use their services, your website is in serious trouble.
The payment provider market is overwhelmingly dominated by two major players — Mastercard and Visa. (For context, Unionpay is primarily in China). PayPal is also a major player, but it mostly stays out of the adult content area.
This then leads us to the question: why do payment providers choose to stop adult websites using their services? There are two major reasons: chargebacks and legal liabilities.
Chargebacks
Chargebacks are a system for allowing your bank to recoup your money from a transaction, in the case of e.g. fraud or a clerical error. For example, if you pay with your credit card for a product that is clearly not as described or some other issue, chargebacks are one way your card provider can get your money back if the merchant is not cooperative.
However, this is inconvenient at best for payment providers, as they refund the money to you, then they get the money back from the merchant. This means they have to be sure the merchant will stay in business, and also increases their costs as they often have to investigate if the merchant is in fact in the wrong or not before blindly issuing a refund to the customer. This requires time and money to do.
As a result, payment providers tend to ban merchants with high levels of chargebacks, irrespective of what industry they are in. However, it is relatively well known that real-life adult content is considered ‘high risk’ by payment processors and has high levels of chargebacks compared to other product categories: buyer’s remorse (you bought something to fap and then regret spending your money afterwards), misleading advertisement to try and compete in the relatively unregulated world of adult content, and other factors all come into this. For context, digital sales provider Gumroad has explained their reasoning on this subject on this page. Most adult content payment providers describe themselves as providers to “high risk businesses”.
According to Expert Market, 86% of chargebacks are probable ‘friendly fraud’ cases (buying a product and trying to get a chargeback even though nothing is wrong with it), and 81% of customers claim ‘convenience’ as a primary motivator in chargebacks. Looking at the statistics, customers certainly aren’t being particularly nice in their handling of this (though to be fair, that’s hardly their fault. Companies don’t treat consumers well unless they have to). Either way, the result is the same: payment providers do *not* like chargebacks.
Legal Liabilities
This is the other primary reason for payment providers generally not liking real-life adult content (and fringe types of fictional content). They are legally bound to ensure that the content being paid for by their systems is legal, generally in the US; as a result, payment providers are keen to check that companies who sell adult content conform to legal requirements.
Given the ease of uploading pornography from non-professional studios and even random anonymous users, this ultimately led to a huge headache for payment providers when it comes to websites like PornHub and OnlyFans: people paying on these websites could well be spending money on dubiously legal or illegal content, and if so, it would be on the payment provider’s head legally speaking. Unlike professional porn studios, it would be extremely difficult and expensive for payment providers to check the legality of every individual sex worker — even collecting things like IDs has not proven to be enough to stop them having a legal headache, unfortunately.
While in the US most fictional pornography is legally fine, real-life pornography means establishing consent and age, which is incredibly difficult to do when everything is online (people have used other people’s IDs to get verification for instance).
Who is the real culprit here?
It is definitely tempting to lay the blame on payment providers for this — as they control an awful lot of what we are allowed to buy and sell. However, this is too simplistic; consider that there is next to nothing for them to gain by banning real-life pornography and much business to lose. Generally they do not care what they are profiting from, moral or otherwise — if they could make money from real-life pornography without all the associated risks making it too difficult, they would.
They are acting to protect themselves, in terms of risk — and this is because comes down to medieval societal attitudes towards sex, which is the reason for so much of the backwards law in the US and elsewhere which payment providers must protect themselves against. This is largely fuelled by religious parts of society (evangelical Christians in America and to a lesser extent in Europe, Muslims in much of the world, and so on) for whom pornography is seen as outright evil, and who command significant influence over government policy due to the proportion of voters that they represent in democracies (and the proportion of the people they represent in non-democratic countries).
As such, the blame for this lies squarely at the feet of medieval cultural attitudes to sex and pornography, fuelled by religion. If this is to change, attitudes towards sex, pornography and sex workers must change, and that becomes a discussion about how to remove religious influence from the law which is outside the scope of this article.
That being said, Post-Culture Review on Twitter wrote an excellent thread explaining how religion (largely evangelical Christianity) is the root cause of this:
Do Patreon / SubscribeStar creators / artists need to be worried?
No.
The vast majority of artists drawing adult content aren’t anywhere near the “legally risky” kind of material that payment providers don’t like. Unlike real-life pornography, where basically any sexual content is deemed high risk due to consent and age issues, fictional content isn’t generally high risk for payment providers unless it gets into legally gray territory like certain extreme fetishes or the like.
Artists drawing especially ‘out-there’ content have some reason to be concerned, but this isn’t new and is a long-standing issue: if you’re close enough to the legal line that Patreon/Subscribestar/Gumroad etc feel you present a legal risk to them, then you probably won’t be on the platform much longer. I have no idea why people think Subscribestar is more lenient; it *might* be at this moment in time because it is smaller than other sites and thus potentially avoiding the same level of scrutiny other subscription platforms get from payment providers, but its requirement to adhere to its payment providers’ rules is exactly the same. It is not different in any useful way.
That being said, that applies to an extremely small number of artists, and many of those already have their own websites as a result of this.
