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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland All Female Braveheart Remake children-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:

Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials

(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)

Big 3 Takeaways:

  • 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. You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
  • Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL. Culture War angle: The market value of female sexuality is greater than everything except the most intensively financialized male performance sport.
  • One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.

What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

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.

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.

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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