OnlyFans’ competitors smell blood—and are going after its adult creators and the piles of money they generate—as the firm waffles on porn. The naked truth behind which platforms stand to gain the most.
Evan Seinfeld, the Brooklyn-born second cousin of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has been getting his online adult content platform IsMyGirl ready for a great migration. He is expecting an influx of thousands of porn stars and sex workers who are leaving OnlyFans, the category leading London-based platform that banned sexually explicit content only to reverse its ban a week later.
“We’re at DEFCON 1,” says Seinfeld, who was the vocalist and bass player of thrash metal band Biohazard before getting into the adult entertainment industry. He says that 1,000 creators signed up for IsMyGirl on the first day OnlyFans announced it would block porn starting in October. The next day, Seinfeld says, 1,400 people signed up for his site. Now thousands of people per day are applying, adding, “It’s too many people coming in.”
OnlyFans, which has been under scrutiny for reportedly having underaged performers on its site, blamed the banks for the porn ban saying they were refusing to process the platform’s transactions. Then six days later OnlyFans did an abrupt volte-face: “We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community,” the company announced in a new statement, “and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change.”
The flip-flopping — and uncertainty surrounding the future (does “suspended” mean “postponed” or “permanently canceled”?) — has hurt OnlyFans’ reputation in the eyes of both creators and users and whether or not they ban porn in the future, the damage is done. After years of vying for other bodily fluids, OnlyFans’ competition now smells blood in the water.
The financial opportunity—and the battle for a portion of OnlyFans’ 1.6 million creators and 150 million users—is huge. The company reported that users spent $2.3 billion in 2020 on the platform, of which OnlyFan’s keeps 20%. An estimated 85% of those payments were for sexually explicit content, according to industry insiders, or about $390 million a year. Now platforms like ManyVids, IsMyGirl, LoyalFans, Fansly, FanCentro, AVN Stars and more are duking it out and trying to grab as much of that cash, and attract as many creators, as possible.
Mary Moody, who has been in the adult industry for six years and is among OnlyFans’ top earners, says she’s moving to Peach, a new platform associated with webcam site Chaturbate.
“People have already lost thousands of dollars, so even if OnlyFans completely reverses their ban, this has caused harm,” says Moody. “More than anything it’s irreparably damaged the trust fans have in individual creators as a business. I lost 300 subscribers within hours of the original announcement—they’re not coming back.”
Moody says she will be focusing her efforts on the new platform Peach because she now feels that OnlyFans doesn’t respect sex workers. “The de-banking and de-platforming of sex workers is occupational discrimination,” says Moody adding, “Banks are for business, not for religious crusades. J.P. Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon and Mastercard need to get out of people’s bedrooms and work on policies with sex workers that reduce harm.”
“If I could capture 10% of [OnlyFans’] runoff, I could retire in two years,” says Seinfeld, from his home in Tulum, Mexico. To that end, IsMyGirl is offering creators a deal: the platform will only take a 10% cut of total earnings, half as much as OnlyFans charges.
FanCentro says it signed up 20,000 creators in the first four days after OnlyFans announced a ban on sexually explicit material.
With 5 million users and 30,000 models, IsMyGirl claims it has paid its creators tens of millions of dollars and the most popular stars on the platform make more than $1 million a year. But that’s still a rounding error compared with the $5 billion OnlyFans has paid out to its creators since launching in 2016.
Stan Fiskin, who founded adult content platform FanCentro in 2017 with Alan Hall, believes his platform can grab as much 30% of OnlyFans’ adult revenues. “[The reversal] might slow down the migration, but I don’t think it’ll stop,” says Fiskin. FanCentro says it signed up 20,000 creators in the first four days after OnlyFans announced a ban on sexually explicit material.
“It’s all hands on deck,” says Fiskin, who says his team has been working 20-hour days to increase server capacity and bandwidth by a factor of ten to make sure the platform can handle the increase in content and traffic. “This is just the beginning. We’re trying to make sure that this business becomes the new OnlyFans.”
FanCentro, which is run from its offices in Matawan, New Jersey, and Limassol, Cyprus, believes it has a competitive advantage over other platforms because of some vertical integration. It owns its own payment processor called CentroBill, and the company also offers free classes to verified influencers through Centro University to teach them how to make more money. Beyond those opportunities, FanCentro is trying to capitalize on OnlyFans’ initial announcement by offering creators 100% of revenues they earn through October and then 80% after that. Fiskin says OnlyFans might have suspended its ban, but he’s still seeing creators flood his platform.
At Montreal-based ManyVids, co-founder and CEO Bella French says they’ve experienced an “explosion” of growth. ManyVids is also offering creators 100% of revenues until October and then 85% payout “forever,” says French, who was a webcam performer for three years before starting MavTek, ManyVids’ parent company, with her boyfriend in 2014.
For ManyVids, which has more than 100,000 models and 3.6 million users, the race is now on to capture as much market share as possible. But it’s not a recipe for an explosion in profits right away. “To be honest, once you take out 85%, pay your employees, your rent, there’s not much left,” says French. “But the way we’re set up makes sense for us. We run here with a very efficient team.”
Tyga, the hip-hop artist who runs one of the most popular OnlyFans accounts, is also looking to fill the vacuum. The 31-year-old performer told Forbes that he deleted his OnlyFans account and is building his own platform called Myystar, which is expected to launch in October and take a 10% cut of creators’ revenue.
Not everyone is leaving, of course. Sophie Dee, a successful porn actress who has become a social media influencer and investor, says she makes more than $1 million a year on OnlyFans. About half of her income is derived from sexually explicit content, mostly from selling “vintage” porn videos from before she stopped shooting scenes, and the other half she makes by selling shoutouts, or short custom videos (a la Cameo) in which she talks to a fan by name and maybe does a quick striptease. After the latest announcement, Dee says she is unlikely to look for a new platform.
“I don’t think it’ll be a blow to my business,” says Dee. “We’re used to it in this world of social media and technology, there’s constant changes and when something shuts down, you adapt to new rules and it opens the door to new opportunities.”
Others are staying but feel insecure. For Maya Morena, the site helped transform her life. In 2017, she was an escort who made ends meet by crashing on her friend’s couch in Brooklyn. After three years of making and selling thousands of pieces of explicit content on OnlyFans, she now earns enough money to rent a two-bedroom apartment and plans to attend college in the fall. She was searching for another platform but is worried about giving up her sole source of income.
“My partner and sisters were happy about OnlyFans’ reversal: ‘The whores won!’ they said. But I don’t really feel like we ever truly do,” she says. “It all feels temporary, like temporary work visa that you know they want to revoke in the future. I know society roots for our downfall.”
Even if most of the creators stay on OnlyFans, Evan Seinfeld says that there’s enough skin to go around because the platform has helped change the cultural stigma and scrubbed much of the shame associated with producing and watching porn.
“People are consuming more porn than ever before and people are creating more porn than ever before,” says Seinfeld, who has been in the adult industry for 20 years. “Your mom said go to college or else you’ll be living like a bum. But maybe it pays better to be hot in this weird post-pandemic world.”
By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff