The rapid growth of the site can be attributed to many causes — pop culture, the pandemic, a federal minimum wage of $7.25. They all play an important role in the growth of the billion-dollar fortune of the site, but none are as crucial to the early development of the site as their referral program. Now of policies past, OnlyFan’s initial referral program promised 5% kick back for every referred creator indefinitely. This in itself became a separate business model, with some users making more revenue off of referrals than their own content. Passive income forever – all you had to do was share your link.
In 2020, this program changed – allowing kickback only for the first year, and capping payout at each referred model’s first million – but by then, the site had already become a household name. Everyone from celebrities to school teachers wanted – or, in many cases, needed – a piece of the proverbial pie. With mainstream acceptance came, yet again, the conservative pushback against the availability of online porn.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) added OnlyFans onto their hit list of top offenders for the first time in 2021. The organization’s “dirty dozen” list placed them alongside businesses like Reddit, Twitter, Visa, and the state of Nevada as “major contributors to sexual exploitation,” stating that OnlyFans creators, “pay the high price of psychological, emotional, and physical harm that the sex industry imparts.” Days later, OnlyFans announced they would ban sexually explicit content from their website.
This was the newest frontier for anti-sex industry organizations. With Backpage taken down, Eros raided by Homeland Security, and Visa cutting ties to PornHub, the next battle to take on was OnlyFans. On the heels of FOSTA/SESTA – the 2018 amendment to the CDA that could hold websites liable for trafficking – the anti-porn lobby had new fuel in their fire in addition to the decades-old puritanical argument of enforcing obscenity law. Websites quickly changed their ToS, and either offshored their servers, or banned adult content entirely.
Despite the site requiring ID verification for all users, biometric face scans for creators, and now having some of the most restrictive policy around content – including a lengthy list of banned words, ranging from hypnotize to lactate – OnlyFans still cracked under the pressure of the anti-sex industry lobby. Institutes that claim to fight for victims in the sex industry – in a legal manner, not in a material one – like NCOSE, Exodus Cry, and Justice Defense Fund, started mounting less pressure on legislature, and more on companies that had ties to porn. A collective campaign began to pressure Visa and Mastercard to immediately stop doing business with PornHub and their parent company MindGeek, with the goal of cutting enough revenue to permanently close the site.