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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20695 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.

This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.

They take a 20% cut, and don't accept cash or crypto. That makes it a pretty unappealing option for money launderers. If the money is coming from stolen credit cards, platforms are quick to track down which creators have an abnormal chargeback rate and ban them.

Fundamentally OnlyFans is no different than Patreon, Gumroad, the Kindle store, etc. There are plenty of storefronts online where an individual can charge money for access to content. They all tend to follow pretty similar best practices for preventing fraud and money laundering.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

The biggest issue with OF money laundering is that there is no cash payment.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

Yeah but a lot of that is frontloaded and once you've got it ticking over you've got a very viable platform for turning dirty cash into bankable money. Also in a lot of Western countries you can potentially double dip by getting 'skilled employee' visas by curating your business to fit into whatever the overlords are saying is undersupplied, which opens up plentiful revenue streams on that side.

Auction houses for modern art don't usually take cash and take similar cuts, and that field is rife with questionable financial activity.

That is less money laundering than it is questionable payoffs for corruption and other acts though. The money being used has already been laundered, if necessary.

Hey, there was a Genshin Impact event about this last week!

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