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&nbsp;Brooklyn-born second cousin of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has been getting his online&nbsp;adult content platform IsMyGirl ready for a great migration. He is expecting an influx of thousands&nbsp;of porn stars and sex workers who are leaving&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-will-never-shed-its-reputation-for-sexually-explicit-content/?sh=1f93ba185f58">OnlyFans</a>, the category&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/06/16/the-shady-secret-history-of-onlyfans-billionaire-owner/?sh=2f625ed65c17">leading London-based platform</a>&nbsp;that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/19/onlyfans-will-block-sexually-explicit-content-in-effort-to-become-more-mainstream/?sh=6553c7b15730">banned sexually explicit content</a>&nbsp;only to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/25/onlyfans-halts-plan-to-block-sexually-explicit-content/?sh=32c2934d5f6e">reverse its ban</a>&nbsp;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&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-will-never-shed-its-reputation-for-sexually-explicit-content/?sh=2b564acd5f58">OnlyFans announced it would block porn</a>&nbsp;starting in October. The next day, Seinfeld says, 1,400 people signed up for his site. Now thousands of people per&nbsp;day&nbsp;are applying, adding, “It’s too many people coming in.”



OnlyFans, which has been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/06/16/the-shady-secret-history-of-onlyfans-billionaire-owner/?sh=2f625ed65c17">under scrutiny</a>&nbsp;for&nbsp;<a href="https://wagner.house.gov/sites/wagner.house.gov/files/FINAL%20-%20Wagner%20Letter%20to%20DOJ%20re%20OnlyFans%20%28102%29.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly</a>&nbsp;having&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">underaged performer</a>s on its site,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca0480b" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blamed the banks</a>&nbsp;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&nbsp;—&nbsp;and uncertainty surrounding the future (does “suspended” mean “postponed” or “permanently canceled”?)&nbsp;—&nbsp;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&nbsp;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.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">FanCentro says it signed up 20,000 creators in the first four days after OnlyFans announced a ban on sexually explicit material.</blockquote>



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



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.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-52260" width="597" height="398" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GettyImages-1233527756-2048x1366.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 597px) 100vw, 597px" /><figcaption> Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images</figcaption></figure></div>



“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&#8217;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&#8217;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&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailfreeman/2021/08/20/tyga-deletes-onlyfans-account-to-launch-competitor-myystar/">told&nbsp;Forbes</a>&nbsp;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.&nbsp;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

VENEZUELA-CRISIS-ONLYFANS

Inside The $390 Million Battle For OnlyFans’ Insatiable Audience

Did the pursuit of venture capital millions lead to a shocking pivot by OnlyFans? The creator platform surprised the online world on Thursday when it <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-to-block-sexually-explicit-videos-starting-in-october" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a> that it would ban sexually explicit content from its site starting in October after such content propelled the site to cultural relevance — and runaway sales growth — during the pandemic.



The move&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/21/tech/onlyfans-creators-react-sexually-explicit-ban/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">came as a surprise</a>&nbsp;for the sex workers who had come to depend on OnlyFans as a source of income. It also happened amidst a<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;BBC investigation</a>&nbsp;that OnlyFans was looking the other way about illegal content. And hours before, Dan Primack at Axios reported that the company was struggling to find name-brand investors that would bolster its credibility – even despite a reported run-rate of $1.2 billion in revenue in 2021 and doubling, and free cash flow of about half of that. “In short, OnlyFans has a porn problem,” Primack&nbsp;<a href="https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-54e49d2e-0527-429d-bb54-7b113c4275f6.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>.



But was venture capital a realistic option for OnlyFans, and does that equation change given its move? Conversations with venture capitalists who met with OnlyFans or have knowledge of its meetings paint a picture of limited, but at least lukewarm interest — and challenges that would face any would-be startup successor leaning into the adult content the company’s abruptly abandoned.



A version of this story first ran in our Midas Touch newsletter on Saturday.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/newsletter/midastouch/">Sign up here</a>&nbsp;to be part of the conversation first.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-vice-clause">The vice clause</h3>



To understand OnlyFans’ VC prospects, one must first consider the “vice clause,” or covenant, that venture capital firms make with the investors whose money they deploy (venture capitalists typically only play with a relatively smaller pool of their own cash, in exchange for a somewhat larger share of the upside). These agreements limit how venture firms can invest away from their core focus. (Such restrictions on holding public equities and cryptocurrency investments, among others, are a big reason name-brand firm Andreessen Horowitz <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/02/andreessen-horowitz-is-blowing-up-the-venture-capital-model-again/">moved in 2019</a> to re-designate itself as technically not a VC firm.)



Larger and more established VCs seek out universities, endowments and non-profit institutions as backers of their funds. And for those organizations, the nightmare scenario is this: a<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/cornell-university-early-investor-massive-183901542.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;headline</a>&nbsp;like “Cornell University Early Investor in Massive Online Porn Firm: Report,” one of several that ran after a deep dive into PornHub’s owner by<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b50dc0a4-54a3-4ef6-88e0-3187511a67a2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;The Financial Times</a>&nbsp;added to the scrutiny on the porn site last winter, and swiftly forced major changes to what content the company kept on its site. As such, the most common such clauses make taboo any investments in areas such as sex, tobacco or historically illegal drugs.



Some firms have no vice clause. Even then, such investments can face extra scrutiny due to the potential for government investigations, crackdowns by payments processors, and backgrounds that don’t fit the pattern matching of Silicon Valley software businesses. (Forbes&nbsp;has previously<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;</a><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/06/16/the-shady-secret-history-of-onlyfans-billionaire-owner/">reported</a>&nbsp;on OnlyFans’ majority owner Leonid Radvinsky’s roots in adult entertainment’s sketchy early era online.)



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Chasing dollars</h3>



OnlyFans met with some of venture capital’s biggest names in its early days (it was a fledgling site when Radvinsky bought control in 2018). One firm passed when it became clear that the site’s future appeared to be mostly porn, says an investor with knowledge of the meeting; at Founders Fund, a firm with no vice clause, former investor Cyan Banister, now a partner at Long Journey Ventures, remembers the firm meeting with OnlyFans and passing because of concerns about its lack of record-keeping on its performers and creators, from age verification to tax information.



“A lot of companies with user-generated content, think that because they are community-driven, they are not responsible, but they are,” Banister says.



OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment.



More recently, firms have met with OnlyFans during its boost in cultural relevance and a sense from investors of its fast pace of growth, sources say. But many were more interested in meeting OnlyFans out of curiosity, speculates a partner at one top-tier firm. “I’ve met with companies because I think they’ll be really cool meetings, knowing there is 0% chance I’d want to invest,” that investor says. “Some VCs just love business stories, hearing how it happened and what they were thinking.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">OnlyFans 2.0</h3>



If OnlyFans is yielding the adult content category — something Banister isn’t so sure of, noting that the company’s announcement gave itself plenty of time for sentiment or decisions to change — would another startup be able to capitalize on VC interest to take up the mantle?



At Vice Ventures, firm founder and former 30 Under 30&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/catharine-dockery/">callout</a>&nbsp;Catharine Dockery invests explicitly in vice companies that make other firms shy away. While Dockery disagrees with some VC investors who told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that such a company would have limited possibilities to find buyers, she notes that OnlyFans follows in a history of other companies like Snap and Tumblr of clamping down on adult content over time.



“A company of their size and scale would usually have a lead for their round with minimal fuss,” Dockery says. “Why are profitable businesses leaving the space and pivoting to unproven business models?”



The history of venture capital investing in such businesses remains limited. Perhaps the most notable example is Arsenic, billed as a Playboy for the Snapchat era and full of suggestive photos and videos of models that could live on the social media platform. Arsenic&nbsp;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/arsenic-snapchat-based-playboy-competitor-raises-seed-round-of-3-million-2016-8#:~:text=Arsenic%2C%20the%20Snapchat%2DBased%20Playboy,Seed%20Round%20of%20%243%20Million" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">raised $3 million</a>&nbsp;in seed funding in 2016 from Crosslink Capital and CrossCut Ventures. The investment appears defunct now: the venture partner who led the investment for CrossCut, Clinton Foy, didn’t respond to a request for comment; Omar El-Ayat, who talked up the investment at the time for Crosslink, is no longer with the firm. He declined to comment.



Interest is there from entrepreneurs, says Dockery, but little substance so far. “I’ve been pitched about 100 different OnlyFans 2.0 startups,” says Dockery. “We would definitely invest in something like that, but OnlyFans is truly the only one with market share.”



Banister, who once ran a website for pin-up photography, says she has gotten countless messages in the past several days asking her to launch her own version. “If I had the stamina and the energy to start another company in the space, and certainty I wouldn’t go to jail, I would do this in a heartbeat,” she says.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The bet</h3>



&nbsp;OnlyFans’ investment options may have opened up with its announcement, while paradoxically shrinking due to their pending loss of growth by shutting off a major vertical on the platform. The biggest risk factors to a business like OnlyFans remain the likes of Visa and MasterCard cutting it off, as well as a high level of charge-backs and fraud — not Sand Hill Road cutting a check.



But for now, those suffering most from the announcement are creators, especially sex workers, who find themselves&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/onlyfans-adult-content-creators-1235000760/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">scrambling after the sudden news</a>. “They are good people, they are adults, and this cuts them off at the knees,” says Banister. “I am not sure where they go next after this.”



Would anyone back OnlyFans now, without its problematic golden goose? The company may struggle to overcome its reputation, even if growth rebounds, investors say. But several investors said they were confident that enough peers would be interested in its financial upside to accept its history, provided it can show a path for growth again. “Anyone who would back [vaping business] JUUL would back OnlyFans,” one quipped.



By Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff

Tag: OnlyFans 2.0

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Inside The $390 Million Battle For OnlyFans’ Insatiable Audience

Inside OnlyFans’ Limited Venture Capital Options — And How VC Would Handle An OnlyFans 2.0