Comment by Applejinx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Applejinx | Hacker News Reader

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If you've ever tried to monetize NSFW content in a context that involves credit cards, you know it is an absolute nightmare. If Onlyfans is seriously NSFW, it may have no problems accepting credit cards but its days are numbered and it runs the risk of the credit card processors unilaterally refusing to service them anymore (especially Visa, IIRC)

Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this. One of the side-effects of the earlier 'not tying payments super tight to individual creators, but just charging patrons for ALL their committments' is that it let them aggregate charges in such a way that patrons were doing business with THEM, not 'NSFWCamGirl69', while still supporting CamGirl as the patron intended. The credit card company didn't really have a way to dig in and go 'prove you're not giving any of this money to porn creators'.

This changed, but Patreon remains a platform where it screens creators pretty well from the moral expectations of credit card processors (and governments? kinda? It's a very tough problem if they expect to do business at all in certain countries)

The question is more 'will Onlyfans be cut off from service by credit card companies': 'growing faster' is not useful if it's doomed. They have to also stay in business and maintain relationships with processors that have a record of showing intent to blacklist certain types of creation.

By your logic, all NSFW online businesses online are vulnerable to their payment processing being taken away from them.

Can this possibly be true?

IIRC there's basically one payment processor, whose name I can't recall, that ~100% of NSFW sites use. And their fees are very high, given the risk of processing those payments.

CCBill and Probiller or something.

CCBill's fees I think are like 11-15% plus $1k per year, pretty insane but underscores the risk

Woah, back when I was forced to implement them they only charged 4%.

They have a 3.9% ("green") tier without a high-risk fee, but I don't think the adult companies qualify that one.

I could be wrong, but I didn't find a clear breakdown of who qualifies for each plan on their website. I'm guessing the 3.9% plan and their non-profit plan are there so they can present as a normal payment processor.

CCBill is the primary one and they charge nearly 4% per transaction and routinely hold transactions for up to 6 months sometimes. They also have high registration fees but they are one of the best for high risk industries.

Payment processors view this as a risk/reward scenario. NSFW content historically has very high chargeback rates. When your overall processing amount is low, the risk is low. As the amount goes up and your business gets more successful, the risk increases as your new customers are more likely to be fickle.

This is a few years out of date but when I investigated what it would take to legally accept credit cards for NSFW content, the processors all wanted a very large bond to hold as protection against chargebacks. I imagine once your daily transaction volume grossly exceeds reasonable bond levels, the processors get pretty flighty.

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