COVID-19, Only Fans, sex, and some Bella Thorne drama

Only Fans (OF) is a marketplace-type of platform, where content creators earn money from paid subscriptions by their users – aka ‘the “fans”. Launched in the UK in 2016, OF it’s owned by a parent company, called Fenix International Limited. Bit of a mystery parent company if you ask me, couldn’t find a hell of a lot on it; the most I found it’s in this article by the New York Times, scroll to ‘the wizard of porn’ paragraph.

OF functions as a platform where the artists – think musicians, chefs, personal trainers, porn actors and actresses, sex workers, etc – can cut the middle man/woman, and distribute their content directly to their fans. The artists, aka content creators, decide what content goes on the platform, set the monthly price they want, and pay 20% to the host site.

OF made the news back in January 2020, when one of their content providers raised more than $1 million in contributions to charity during the wild bushfires in Australia (yeah, 2020 really didn’t have a good start). This started a trend, which continued for a short while.

OF stayed in the news over the course of 2020, not always for the right reasons. In April, BBC Three published a documentary denouncing the lack of control over the content, including the exploitation of underage content creators who drove traffic to the site. In May, the site had 24 m registered and saw 200k new users every 24 hours with 7-8k new creators joining every day. In July, Sky News published information that they had not paid VAT in the last 3 years (ouch). In August, the Bella Thorne case sparked huge controversy; the ex-Disney star claimed she was going to publish nude photos of her, and then kinda didn’t (yet still cashed in more than $2 million in less than a week)…. fans were NOT happy. 

Shortly after that, guess what, OF rolled out new restrictions to limit what content creators (and therefore also sex workers) could charge on the platform. Obviously OF officially denied that the new restrictions were related to Thorne, but hey! it was done.

Patreon is another marketplace-type of platform. It was funded in 2013 by a musician who wanted to make a living from his YouTube videos and his friend, a developer, both based in San Francisco, USA. Patreon was a place where content creators earned money from paid subscriptions by their users – aka ‘the “patrons”. Yep, that’s right, the format is very similar to Only Fans. They also charge similar fees, 5-12% of creators’ monthly income plus some processing fees.

Patreon received various investments between 2013 and 2016, and acquired Subbable (a similar voluntary subscription service created by the Green brothers). Didn’t stop there, reached 50,000 creators in 2017, and then acquired another membership service company, Memberful, in 2018. That’s also the year Patreon started banning some of the adult content produced by its own creators.

In some way, those limitations defined even more Patreon’s content creators. The site is build in a way where the content is split by type (think video/films, podcast, comedy, comics, games, education, etc.). There are YouTube videographers (obviously), webcomic artists, writers, podcasters, musicians, some adult content creators, and more.