OnlyFans Isn’t Really Dumb Enough to Ban Porn, Is It?

A few days ago Ikumi Nakamura, the video game art director who stole the show at E3 2019 with her adorable dance, set anime and video game Twitter on fire when she replied to someone joking about her starting an OnlyFans at this year’s E3.

Sensei 🙋‍♀️ I have question for you. What is “only fans account??” .

— Ikumi Nakamura 🪐@unseentokyo (@nakamura193) May 11, 2020

She ended the discussion with this:

Everyone, Thanks for your concern. 🙏😊 I can now understand. So, I murmur this ↓↓ pic.twitter.com/cqeAfAiW4E

— Ikumi Nakamura 🪐@unseentokyo (@nakamura193) May 11, 2020

OnlyFans, however, has been trying to market themselves to people who do things other than take their clothes off. I mean, they always have been, but they’ve been pushing it more lately.

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There have also been a few people who do porn on OnlyFans claiming they’ve had problems with the site not paying them and closing their accounts.

Taken together it’s leading to rumors the site is going to do what Tumblr did and ban adult content.

I don’t think it’s likely. The reason Tumblr banned porn and the reason OnlyFans would theoretically do the same is to make the platform more appealing to advertisers. The problem here is that OnlyFans doesn’t need advertisers because they take a piece of all the money people pay to performers on the platform.

And despite their efforts to promote themselves as a site for artists and musicians and stand-up comics, they rely on women taking their clothes off for the large bulk of their money.

It does seem like most websites want to “clean up their image” these days, with Twitter users being to mean or Facebook users being old and dumb and racist, but OnlyFans has basically nothing other than porn going on for it and they’re not going to sacrifice 90% of their income to chase some weird dream of being Instagram but where people pay to follow you. Instagram is already Instagram and it’s free.

I would be very surprised if there was anything to these rumors in the near future. OnlyFans would have to massively increase their non-porn user base to push porn off, and they don’t really have a strategy to do that.