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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21845 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.

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.

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.

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