Shaky Platform

On the godforsaken cowardice of porn sites.

I’m told by people who’ve been in the industry (even) longer than I have, that this godawful pattern is normal. Every few years a new platform for pornography will appear, offering something better than whatever’s gone before, or something new (as OnlyFans did by allowing creators to essentially monetize their social media).

Producers and models will begin to use this new platform to sell their content, and the site will grow, using the income it receives from commission on our sales to expand its reach, and building a customer base in the process. Creators like me will begin to rely upon it, first for additional income, and then, if the platform becomes successful enough, as our main income, or even (and this is dangerous) our sole income. This is something we saw during the 2020 Covid lockdowns, when people who’d not necessarily considered sex work before had time to investigate OnlyFans, and discovered that for some, it was possible to make a full-time income from home that way.

I’d love to tell you that the cycle just continues this way, with new platforms emerging every few years, giving more choice to creators and customers alike, and forcing the websites we use to remain competitive while providing an excellent user experience. But sadly, that’s not how it works. What happens next, generally, after a few good years, is that the platform will self-destruct. Often, this seems to be at least initially precipitated by external pressures. For OnlyFans, for example, it was scrutiny from Visa and Mastercard, and then from various national governments, that made it become first increasingly censorious, then to announce it was banning adult content altogether, and finally to reverse that disastrous choice after a massive backlash, but to fail so comprehensively in taking on enough staff to sensibly moderate the vast cascade of content being uploaded to OF on a daily basis, that it became essentially unusable for anyone producing anything other than entirely vanilla content. In the process, it also began to hide its pornographic reality behind a safe for work (SFW) facade, which sees OnlyFans’ social media feed looking very much like a pallid, underpopulated version of YouTube.

When things like this happen, porn creators, who tend to be resilient through necessity, will begin to search for new platforms. When OF announced its new no-porn policy, most of us jumped to Fansly, JustForFans, or LoyalFans to host our content as an alternative. At the time, twenty five percent of my income came from OF, but as a BDSM performer, I didn’t have a choice — I had to jump before I was pushed, because I couldn’t afford to have a quarter of my income suddenly disappear overnight, and I couldn’t risk having my customers suddenly denied access to the service they’d paid for.

I chose LoyalFans, and have spent the last 2 years trying to make it replace my OF income. Sadly, I’ve had to concede the site just doesn’t have the traffic to do that, and I can’t make my page grow beyond where it got to in its first few months. OF was making me £4000 a month at its height; LoyalFans makes me £1000 on its very best months. So after almost 2 years away from OF, I’ve begun uploading daily vanilla content on my OF again. I’ve got no intention of shutting my LoyalFans page, because the core of my customer base is kinky and I like making content for them, but OF, for all its faults, has traffic, and within a month of starting up on it again, its already making more money than my LoyalFans page. I don’t exactly know who’s joining up to see me doing sternly vanilla things (getting undressed, getting dressed again, getting undressed) but there are lots of them. My best guess is that many customers simply trust OF with their credit card details in a way that they don’t with smaller sites, and that they’re prepared to watch less diverse content in order to feel safe. I don’t like the feeling that I’m representing myself in a way that passes over my actual sexual identity, and I wish OnlyFans had found the courage to fight the payment processing companies. Their financial resources, after all, are almost unfathomably vast.

During this time, I’ve been grateful that Clips4Sale and ManyVids, the two platforms I use to resell my custom video content, have remained relatively stable. I say ‘relatively’ because it’s not as though they’ve been without drama. Under pressure (again) from Visa and Mastercard, Clips4Sale updated their terms of service to exclude a raft of activities that had once been allowed, and have taken to moderating creators’ videos with a level of incompetence that would be hilarious, if it wasn’t for the fact that our income from these sites is how we all pay our mortgages. A 4K version of a video will be disallowed for violating the new content rules, while the identical HD version of the same movie will be approved. Videos will be flagged for featuring additional performers who’ve not been identified in the film’s paperwork, when no such performer appears. Clips4Sale, just like OF, appears to be groaning under the weight of a deluge of content they need to moderate, while employing nowhere near enough staff to take on the task. Getting replies from Support has become challenging in the extreme, and Twitter/X is full of creators sharing their stories of being ignored by support staff, or being given repeated cursory responses that don’t address their specific problems.

But at least, for now, Clips4Sale is still basically behaving like a porn site. It hosts porn, it provides billing, it pays out to us on a monthly basis (taking a whopping 40% cut of our earnings, but still), and it doesn’t pretend that it’s actually YouTube, or start pressurising us to upload makeup tutorials instead of bound orgasms. Which can’t be said of its largest rival, ManyVids.

In contrast to Clips4Sale, ManyVids has been behaving as though it’s been taken over by an alien. Specifically a loud, insistent, puritanical alien who doesn’t like pornography. Creators received an email a couple of weeks ago warning us that since age verification laws have been passed in various territories worldwide (including the UK, joy), websites that feature pornography as over 1/3 of their total output will be subject to increased scrutiny. ManyVids’ elegant solution, according to its email, is to encourage its many thousands of porn creators to produce SFW content instead. As though our customers will be too stupid to notice that overnight, our work will become next-to-impossible to masturbate to.

Helpfully, MV even suggested some examples in their mail. We’re advised to try shooting:

• A quick behind-the-scenes clip 

• A moment of you cooking, dancing, or sharing your hobbies 

• A fun “Who I Am” vid about what you love beyond NSFW 

Or even getting ready before a shoot! 

You might be thinking that’s the kind of thing that pornographers like me already put up, for free, on social media, and you would be right. MV doesn’t appear to be suggesting that we try to charge for this trivia (which is just as well, because no one’s gonna pay for it). Instead, their idea seems to be that by flooding the site with non-pornographic content, ManyVids can beat the ‘one third porn’ rule, and that its pornographic content (the thing that actually generates the income for the entire company) can slip under the censors’ radar.

Parenthetically, their content suggestions are utterly raving. I actually used to put up SFW content on MV, since I already shot videos for YouTube and it wasn’t much trouble to duplicate the uploads for MV customers to enjoy too. But then MV started sending me warnings for non-compliance, because on MV (cos it’s a porn site, you see) there are additional rules that don’t apply on, for example, YouTube. Mentioning childhood for example, or linking to your Substack, talking about pets, advertising your forthcoming book, directing people to your Twitter profile… So I deleted all my SFW content, cos I’m hoping to live a nice long time, but even if I do, I sense that life is still too short to spend it scouring your old YouTube videos for mentions that might get your porn account banned and your income decimated. And there’s no way I’d be willing to actually re-edit them, with no promise of being able to earn from the new versions anyway.

It’s all very strange (unless you buy into the porn-hating alien thesis, in which case it all makes sense and should probably be made into a movie). In 2025, there’s no way that MV can compete with YouTube or TikTok, where creators are already earning money via advertising, as well as being able to link to their other commercial products. I can’t see why anyone capable of producing SFW content wouldn’t already be producing it, and putting it on YouTube etc, where it can be monetized in multiple existing ways.

But quite apart from my practical concerns, the idea of a porn site pretending to be something other than a porn site feels like the exact opposite of a good way to protect children from stumbling across porn online, which was ostensibly the purpose of the age verification laws in the first place. Imagine if YouTube suddenly featured 25% pornography, for example. Would that still feel like a relatively safe place for children to visit? I think the answer would probably be no. If porn sites start plastering their front pages with videos of fully-clothed pornographers (dancing, cooking, putting on makeup!) surely we risk drawing underage users to the platform, where they’ll eventually be exposed to actual porn? Not least because the beleaguered (dancing, cooking, makeup-applying) porn stars will inevitably need to try to be as suggestive as possible during their SFW videos, in order to goad their (adult, porn-buying) customers into purchasing some of the NSFW content which will allow them to actually pay their rent? The idea of being made to simultaneously be a child-friendly entertainer AND an x-rated performer, all for the same platform, just because that platform lacks the courage to use their massive financial resources to actually fight for our way of life instead of just capitulating to this nonsense, makes me feel dreadfully tired.

52% of the adult population accesses pornography, for heaven’s sake, and no one needs to watch us presenting mealy-mouthed, half-hearted yoga tutorials instead of producing the work that adults actually want to buy from us. Every time a porn platform loses its courage, the creators who’ve trusted it for being ‘a sex positive environment!’ or ‘a safe place for erotic creatives!’ or ‘run by sex workers for sex workers!’ have to confront the unpalatable reality that their years of work in uploading content and building their customer base, might be about to go up in smoke. Again. And then, we have to find our next platform, hope that it gets traffic, and start again, producing content that will currently fall within the guidelines of what’s acceptable, but which could suddenly become unpublishable, when someone at Visa decides that a model wearing a gas mask might be being suffocated, or that a model lying in bed might actually be dead. Or, you know, that they need a model release for an additional performer that they insist is in shot, but which is, in fact, merely a peach-coloured sofa cushion.

I feel like such a wanker typing all this to you — I really love my job, and it’s made me a millionaire, so it’s not like I personally need your sympathy at this point, even if it is rather annoying, seeing our income from platforms we’ve collaborated with for years, decline despite our own best efforts to produce work we’re proud of. But leaving my own circumstances aside for a moment, people who go into sex work are disproportionately likely to have vulnerabilities, or disabilities, to have come from non-ideal family backgrounds, or to have disrupted educational histories. We don’t all have the support necessary to launch a new business if pornography becomes politically impossible, and we certainly can’t necessarily afford to retrain as electricians (or Tradwives, or whatever it is that the anti-porn people want us to be) or spend years building commercial YouTube channels devoted to British gastropubs, or swan-sighting, or the paleo diet, in order to replace our lost incomes. Besides, would that be any more valuable to society anyway? People need orgasms, and we’re good at providing them. We should be allowed to get on with doing exactly that, since the majority of the population is secretly availing itself of our output. And it’d be lovely if the platforms that have enriched themselves from our labour would show a little backbone and stand with us while we do so, without making us pretend that we’re actually florists, or Pilates teachers, or vegan goddam chefs.