By now you may have heard the big news. OnlyFans has declared that it will ban all pornographic content from its website in October. Supposedly this is being done to appease payment processors and major credit card companies. Yet adult cams continue on unabated. And of course all the cam sites continue to accept major credit cards through payment processors. So obviously something else is involved here. I will leave it partially up to the reader to figure out what that is.
I suggested that Only Fans might ban porn almost two months ago in a report on porn still worth paying for. At the time I wrote about a rumor that Only Fans wanted to “clean up its act” in a bid to find a major financial sponsor or buyer. It seems that is indeed what is going on here. Sure they are throwing sex workers and their customers out with the bath water. But why would they possibly care about that when millions or even billions of dollars might be available?
Years ago Tumblr moved to ban adult content from its platform. Countless pages and pictures were purged in that great “clean up”. The result was that lots of users like me were driven away from the site for good. These days you can still find plenty of porn on Tumblr. But you won’t find so many active users. Tumblr is now a lot less popular than it used to be. The whole thing seems like a waste of time.
How about Porn Hub? They wiped countless accounts, pictures and videos from their site not long ago. In the process they lost untold millions of users and views. Sure PornHub is still the 74th most popular website in the world. Yet it is nothing like what it used to be with an active community of creators and viewers. The Porn Hub bid was surely more successful than Tumblr’s. I doubt the same will be said about Only Fans. I can only imagine that their site will plummet like Myspace after the Murdoch buyout. Only time will tell.
Meanwhile adult webcamming is as popular as it has ever been. I just tuned in to view some Asian cams only to find more models than I have ever seen before. The number of cam sites and models has only continued to grow over the years even as an array of forces from social media giants to out of touch politicians sought to throttle amateur porn producers. It has also persisted on despite the premature proclamation of “the death of porn”.
Live cams are popular and they will continue to draw in both performers and viewers. While there is plethora of prerecorded pornographic or “adult content” available online these days that is not the same as a live show where viewers can interact with performers in real time and even help direct their behaviors. Adult cams persist for the same reason that strip clubs do. That seems suitable since strip clubs also accept major credit cards without issue.
