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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers.

Alternatively the OF industry is finding out that the push for subscription revenue/arr was total bullshit pushed by blackrock and private equity, and actually isn't as effective at extracting money from customers as expected.

Gaming has definitely gone all in on f2p and microtransactions and it works. A whale who drops thousands on gacha is worth orders of magnitude more than someone paying 9.99 a month for subscription.

As far as I am aware there are some OF sellers that sell videos and image sets individually, which also happens to be the way that traditional pr0n worked.

Putting on my ecommerce hat and looking at the graph in https://instagram.com/reel/DN6HkAKDhYp/ from ostensibly the biggest Onlyfans seller. I'm kinda surprised how consistent the monthly earn looks to be aside from that one huge spike. I do suspect that a girl like Sophie's probably powered by a few whales (and having worked in online gambling it is frankly insane how whale a whale can be).

Intuitively, subscriptions are a bad financial model for expenses with no upper bound. Addicts will drop hundreds or thousands more than they planned to if you catch them at the right point in their spiral. Gamblers, drugs or gooners... all the same.

Tradeoff is that the gym membership model is a lot more reliable for cashflow; if you court whales, even a small economic downturn can have buyers you've put a ton of time and effort into become much more wallet-aware.

Of course, both.jpg is an option, too. FFXIV is one of the 'healthier' options down that path, but there's definitely people who forget about their subscription for months or only do the story on one hand, and those who want every single unlock including the paid ones on the other. Probably a decent number of players who've gone from one category to the other and back again!

In the furry world, the meta seems to have fallen this way, such that old or gratis (especially free-to-view comics) work is advertising, patreon or subscribestar funding acts as a base income stream, and personalized commissions or your-characters-here handle sudden expenses and otherwise act as an adjustable way to turn time into funding. But the incentives and forces in the furry fandom are pretty different from OF.

As far as I am aware there are some OF sellers that sell videos and image sets individually, which also happens to be the way that traditional pr0n worked.

My understanding is that it’s most of them, and “all my videos are on my onlyfans!” is a marketing differentiator. You pull the suckers in with a subscription, and then upsell them on individual pieces of content once they’ve built the loyalty of having already given you money. Onlyfans subscribers are a customer base pre-selected and filtered for willingness to give you money to see you naked.

But also the Russians have cornered the market on “free access to archived onlyfans posts from any popular user”, having redistributed the means of reproduction. If you know you know.

All online guides for OF say that PPV is the key to success. However, there are enough content creators that are quite vocal about offering no PPV ever. I wonder what's going on.

  • Hypothesis 1: they are just dumb and are leaving money on the ground
  • Hypothesis 2: they have an exhibitionist kink and are just monetizing it without turning it into a business
  • Hypothesis 3: they consider PPV unethical
  • Hypothesis 4: they are competing for financially prudent coomers, who have a fixed monthly budget for OF and will spend it on subscriptions that provide the most bang for the buck

  • Hypothesis 5: (master) bait and switch; PPV will sneak in once they’re established.

  • Hypothesis 6: the guides are intentionally or unintentionally wrong.

  • Hypothesis 7: Competing on the margin by undercutting models who do PPV.

I’m guessing it’s the last one. Price discovery at work.

Sci-hub is branching out?

I'd guess it's also driven by wall posts being easier to scrape and share the whole history while messages make it harder for one subscription to get all the goods.

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