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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

Platforms like onlyfans sell two products. They sell safe/clean sex work to a variety of people who would never get into regular sex work. And they sell the feeling of mattering and a sense of human connection to people who suffer from loneliness.

The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for that though, maybe it’s hard to keep the same subscribers?

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Are you suggesting content creators should run their own website? If they have the time & skills, sure. But running your own website is expensive in both time and money.

It's not expensive, difficult or very time consuming to have a static website connected to a email marketing or newsletter service in order to communicate directly to people and improve the services offered. Basic marketing strategy. There's no need to run the entire business on their own.

> It's not expensive

It absolutely is, because you still need to get paid, and unfortunately 18-20% fees are completely normal for adult-content payment processing. And OF clearly does a lot more than just payment processing.

Each one of those things can be done for free until a certain point (e-mail marketing) or completely free (static sites/hosting). Feel free to ping me if you need concrete examples of services that can do that – and there are many.

You seem to greatly underestimate what it takes to run such a business, both from the content creator and business owner pov. This reminds me of the “I can build facebook over the weekend” argument.

Yeah, and marc also skipped over the part where the creator actually gets paid.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm a creator too. I was talking about the marketing side of the business only and not about substitution of the those platforms.

>The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform.

Discoverability. The same reason why Youtube content creators stick with the platform.

Do people join onlyfans and then find models? I always assumed most of the marketing took place on other platforms like Instagram.

My YouTube thing may be broken from the amount or miniature painting videos I watch, but I rarely get a suggestion for anything that I haven’t visited before. Well except for that world of Warcraft streamer asmodal even though I haven’t played world of Warcraft since the burning crusade something like 10 years ago. Most of those miniature channels have patrons which I guess is similar to onlyfans, but I would’ve frankly never known about neither their YouTube channels or patrons if I hadn’t seen their stuff on Reddit’s miniature painting or blood bowl subreddits first, and from there they might as well have lead me to their own sites. Which most of the more successful painters actually do.

I have no clue. My guess is that the platform is a known entity and users are comfortable engaging with other sellers on it, opposed to one-off markets. I also guess that there is cross collaboration and references and search ability

There is zero discoverability on onlyfans. The only people making money are those with a built in audience from other platforms.

Do you enter CC info on random porn sites?

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