OnlyFans is pumping the breaks on its controversial decision to ban pornography, but the damage may already be done to the content subscription service.
Content creators and subscribers were immediately skeptical of the announcement.
“sexworkers if you decide to stay on onlyfans pull your money out as often as you can,” Twitter user @bimbomarxist tweeted. “don’t trust these [expletive].”
Today’s decision comes nearly a week after the platform announced it would ban sexually explicit content platform-wide starting Oct. 1, a move that received swift blowback from sex workers and consumers alike.
“We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change,” OnlyFans tweeted Wednesday morning. “OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.”
Creators flooded the Twitter thread with their questions and concerns, with one saying subscriptions had plummeted.
And that’s just last night. Overall I’ve lost about 500 subscribers. This is my only source of income and your indecisiveness and poor communication has made models and subscribers scramble and caused chaos. Give us a temporary fee reduction to help us if you are actually sorry.
— Hexx Girl (@hexx_girl) August 25, 2021
“Overall I’ve lost about 500 subscribers. This is my only source of income and your indecisiveness and poor communication has made models and subscribers scramble and caused chaos. Give us a temporary fee reduction to help us if you are actually sorry,” @hexx_girl tweeted.
Others called for another kind of suspension: a temporary decrease on the platform’s 20% fee for users.
give sexworkers a 100% payout percentage a month for every hour you caused them irredeemable stress/strife since the moment you said you were cutting out all explicit content on your platform & start tweeting out adult models on your Twitter feed regularly from now until forever
— ✨ Kati3 ✨ (@Kati3kat) August 25, 2021
Another user rebuked the platform’s usage of the term creators, insisting it instead refer to them appropriately as sex workers.
Ok but you’re back to calling us creators. You can call us sex workers. Or is this your subtle way of going back to ignoring us
— ✨Freshie Juice✨ (@FreshieJuice) August 25, 2021
“Ok but you’re back to calling us creators. You can call us sex workers. Or is this your subtle way of going back to ignoring us,” @FreshieJuice tweeted.
In an email to Yahoo Finance, an OnlyFans spokesperson said the “proposed October 1, 2021, changes are no longer required due to banking partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators” and declined to comment further.
Launched in 2016, OnlyFans says it has paid out more than $5 billion to creators and racked up more than 130 million users. Content creators such as musicians and sex workers flooded OnlyFans during the pandemic to make money in the absence of in-person events, netting the platform 20% of revenue generated by an estimated two million creators.
Creators swiftly called OnlyFans out for its earlier decision to ban pornography, contending the platform’s recent success was largely due to sex workers embracing the site and bringing in droves of subscribers.
OnlyFans initially pointed the finger at its banking partners in a statement made to Variety, saying the new policies aligned with requests made by the banks and payout partners.
But at least one credit card company said that it put no pressure on the video platform to remove adult content. “It’s a decision they came to themselves,” Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, told CNN Business.