I don't understand why they thought that move would benefit them. I don't understand how Jack Conte is still CEO after such a stupid change or how he can say with a straight face that he's "taking responsibility".
1. Make a way for people to get paid over the Internet for making stuff.
2. Be okay with horny stuff, possibly as an explicit choice in the beginning, possibly as a pivot when people who make horny stuff start shifting a lot of money through the pipeline you're providing.
3. Get big enough for Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google to notice that you sure are pushing a lot of horny money through their payment systems. Which have a lot of clauses that basically boil down to "no horny".
4. You have a choice here: figure out how to work completely outside of whichever payment system's owner is saying "no horny", or ban horny. I've never seen anyone take the former option.
5. Make a wishy-washy blog post about how you are banning horny stuff that completely fails to come out and say "this really sucks and we hate to do it but we can either drop our horny creators and keep existing as a company, or we can pretty much pack up the entire affair; here are some ways you can go put pressure on Visa/MC/Google/Apple/your lawmakers/etc to maybe change this state of affairs for the next people to follow this path, seriously this is 100% happening because V/MC/G/A finally noticed we have been blatantly skirting these rules".
This has happened many times before, and it will continue to happen many times in the future until someone chooses "fuck all existing payment processors, we're finding a new way to get money from customers to creators" and makes it work.
From your post, you make it seem like OnlyFans cannot possibly exist. It does, and therefore Patreon could have built it.
OnlyFans could exist, sure, but like every other horny service ever it had a built-in time limit. When Visa/MC/Apple/etc notice how much porn money you’re doing, then the axe falls. Maybe you continue without the porn. Maybe you fold up. Either way all the pornmongers leave and look for a new way to get paid. In a few years they will be doing this again.
Patreon could have built OF, in theory, but this would require them to have more than the vaguest interest in actually building anything new. I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for my art since a few months after they launched and this is not a thing they have. I’m not sure they even actually have anyone who can do backend development any more. Mostly they just fuck up the front end every few years.
As to why, Patreon was ALSO the organization most apt to sniff the size of that market. Those were their current customers! If OnlyFans managed to glimpse to potential revenue and build their platform, Patreon would have been aware.
They had the platform, they had a known brand, they had relations with some of the clients, they knew how many people they were kicking out. This was such a huge advantage over anybody else.
Does Only Fans have any non-porn content? I really don't know because in my head Only Fans is a place for porn.
A summary:
* mark horny stuff as 18+
* all horny posts must be patron-only
* drawings are okay but no photos/video of actual people going at it
* no bestiality, rape, kids, incest, necrophilia, or dubcon/noncon
As a creator of horny art I do not look forwards to the day when Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google/etc leans on Patreon and says "hey we banned all horny content, you can either ban it too or you can quit working with us".
Patreon and Patreon Red or something, where one is adult content only and the other is not.