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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25903 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.

Modhat off: Twitter delenda est, so I guess I’m going to rely on your takeaways. Primary sources are for chumps :)

  • Makes sense. I’m only surprised that no one has tried to sell “bundle” subscriptions a la cable TV in an effort to rejuvenate their flagging model.
  • Sports are guaranteed to make weird comparisons. OnlyFans has no merch, no endorsements, and apparently not much in the way of subscriptions. You need something that emphasizes distribution and, apparently, personalized content. Netflix spent like $18B on content this year. Spotify is more complicated thanks to the existing royalty regime. I have no idea how social media expenses work. But those are all going to be closer fits to a pornography platform.
  • These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset. Sakamoto is gonna be so pissed.

social degeneration

You mean, like, compared to the past? Because those three vices are classic. Literally classic. Cannabis wasn’t all that popular in Rome, but they had the other two covered. I think the same is true for most every society past a minimum level of economic freedom. If you can find or produce drugs, people will demand them. If you can afford specialist sports, people will gamble on them. And there’s no “if” for the world’s oldest profession.

young males

No, please! You’ll summon the evo-psych crowd! I’ve had more than enough from them lately.

But also—always has been.

OnlyFans has no merch

God help me for saying this, but "gamer girl bath water" was available for sale at one point.

Didn't Sydney Sweeney do something like that too?

I don't know. I wish I didn't even know as much as I do.

I considered it sort of a parody reference, but yes, Sydney Sweeney did a collaboration with Dr. Squatch that (supposedly!) used her bathwater to make a batch of soap. Not just a jar of water a la Belle Delphine.

Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.

Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.

Not surprised; she seems quite Moody!

Fun fact- it’s archaeologically visible thé ages at which males leave their parent’s houses because their diets decline. It’s thought that this is due to spending their money on vices rather than food.

Ha! That is a fun fact.

These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated

SoftWhiteUnderbelly had a recent interview with an OnlyFans agency manager/founder who claimed that his clients rely on a stack of content that they endlessly recycle as the subscribers fade out and are replaced. The average subscriber lasts about a year and I imagine you can keep the diehards hooked with a sprinkling of new material released at random much like a Skinner box. The manager also confessed that he's retiring due to, among other reasons, the foreseeable competition coming from AI.

In the 50s there were comic book companies which had series which only had like 24 issues which they cycled through publishing on the same theory, that boys who discovered comics at 12 would age out into baseball and girls by 14 so there was no point in having more than 2 years worth of material.

This is what TVTropes calls the Fleeting Demographic Rule. It's not limited to comic books; you can find examples in any medium aimed at children.

This also explains the npm ecosystem.

Really interesting interview. The guy is very pragmatic, but his exit plan is to get as far away from the degeneration of society once he gets his nest egg together.

SoftWhiteUnderbelly had a recent interview with an OnlyFans agency manager/founder

Link

what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset.

I feel like I've heard this sentiment described for the better part of two decades now. While I'm sure there are some, um, connoisseurs of older content out there [1], the generalized death of new content production due to cheap copies of existing content floating around seems to have never arrived. Similarly for open source not leaving software developers unemployed, or file sharing not destroying the music and movie businesses.

  1. Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?

As a connoisseur of older content, I really don't understand. I mean, I like newer content too, but as some comedian once said, why is new porn being made? Has anyone already seen everything that exists for free on the internet? Really, there's so much good porn from the 2000s, and I find new stuff from that era all the time.

Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?

Yes, that makes it better. There's something I find to be a strong turn on by thinking about the timelessness of sex. And to be clear, I'm not taking about GILF porn, I'm not into that at all, just normal porn from people who some may consider to be GILFs now.

When you get really into porn degeneration you start wanting more and more specific stuff. It's like any connoisseur, you're satisfied with slop and don't even have to words to describe the notes of different fetishes involved. Yes, yes, pornoisseur could get an orgasm with your 2000s era stuff, and the wine connoisseur could get drunk off the swill they serve at college bars but they're chasing a more refined pallet. They're trying to recreate the wonder and discovery of when they first snuck into their dad's office while he was away and typed 'S-E-X' into google and were forever changed.

Yikes. For some reason, I end up getting more scared off by any refined palate, non-vanilla, porn stuff. Even simple things like foot fetish porn kinda weirds me out. Maybe because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, resulting in my being unable to fuck my wife, and then go down in an ever accelerating spiral, ending with me dying like David Carradine.

I feel like Foot Fetish is its own kinda weird thing where it's either a hard yes or a hard no for people. Maybe I'm totally off-base but I don't think it's the sort of fetish you slippery slope on it's more binary and inbuilt.

Yes, I don't go down the rabbit hole of porn either and keep my alcohol tastes to mid shelf stuff for the same reason.

I find 480p porn to be unwatchable, and really only tolerate 720p if it's something special.

Sure, people are doing "new stuff" but camera technology and bandwidth capabilities alone have led to a pretty good treadmill. I haven't tried VR porn but a friend that has gave it rave reviews, so that's another full cycle there.

Personally, I think I'm going to limit my use of my Oculus to BeatSaber, I just can't picture myself wearing a heavy headset with an exposed dong. It's too dystopian.

BeatSaber

I honesty thought this was some VR porn or masterbation reference. Scrolling down I gather it is some innocuous VR device or game. They wasted a great VR porn name.

Haha. I have not tried an Oculus with VR porn, but just tried with using a mouse to scroll where the view is pointed. I don't really see the point of it. There's almost always only one view I want to see, which is the view where the entire woman is in the camera. I don't want to look off to the side. Maybe that'd work if the VR device had a way of simulating you, so it could feel like you're having sex while looking elsewhere, but for now I don't think we have that.

for now I don't think we have that.

I'd like to think that, too -- however, allow me to introduce you to the field of teledildonics...

Well I'm not too surprised that exists. But let's see if it catches on. I think there might have been a talk on the Motte a few years ago (I think) about how male sex toys will never achieve mainstream popularity, or even just sub-mainstream.

We truly are living in the Jetsons' world, huh?

I still would have preferred a flying car though.

“You will beat your saber, and you will be happy.”

If they had a good life or just vanished into private life I agree. But some porn starlets from the 2000s died (drug overdose, suicide, just life) and their content is unwhackable to me now.

I guess that makes sense. But I don't follow these people's lives, so I wouldn't really know what happened to them. Ignorance is bliss.

These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset. Sakamoto is gonna be so pissed.

Deflation and depreciation are opposites. Deflation means your currency gains value over time; depreciation means it loses value.

Whoops. You can tell it’s been a while since I read the bitcoin lore. Also, I botched Nakamoto’s name.

I was a little confused: I looked up Sakamoto and didn't see the connection!

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