Cryptos: The only adult in the room

The OnlyFans saga has led to sex-workers looking at Rs currency as an alternative

Sex-workers are early adopters of new technology and the sector is an online bellwether. While civilised countries generally allow consenting adults to earn a living from sex-work, erotic photoshoots and adult movies, sex-workers are often badly exploited.

It’s hard to verify performers are indeed, consenting, and adults. This makes financial service providers wary about processing sex-work payments. That is leading to tectonic shifts in the industry and the laws around it.

OnlyFans (OF), a big platform for adult content, may be a test case. OF has had trouble with financial service providers and threatened to ban explicit content from October. However, after renegotiations, it has stated that it will not ban explicit content. There are no guarantees this stance will not change again.

Last year, as physical interactions were cut off, adult content and interactions shifted completely to the Web. OF was a beneficiary. It combines the features of Instagram and Patreon. Anybody can set up an OF account and post content, a la Insta. They can implement a subscription model a la Patreon, where “fans” pay for extra content, or one-on-one interactions, etc. OF takes a cut, of course.

While all sorts of content is disseminated on OF, it’s dominated by porn and erotica. There are thousands of sex workers on the platform, and over 130 million users have made at least one payment. The revenue is overwhelmingly adult-oriented.

The OF model is more equitable for sex-workers. In contrast to normal cinema, porn used to operate on one-time payments. Hired actors get no royalties based on eyeballs/downloads. OF let them generate recurring revenue from their content and gave them a channel to connect directly to viewers who wished to hire them for private work. Another reason why this is a better model relates to copyright. Creators keep better control of content.

In 2020, the big aggregator website, Pornhub, which is a property of Mindgeek, was at the centre of a firestorm that also resulted in a better deal for some sex workers and a clean-up of violent videos, and underage-porn. Pornhub has a YouTube type of business model, albeit with specialised content. Anyone can upload anything. It may be created by them and indeed, the Pornhub platform has created stars with popular self-created content.

But Pornhub also used to host millions of videos, which broke copyright. In addition, it contained many videos with depictions of violent, non-consensual acts and it had no real process for verification of age and consent.

After damning investigative news reports, and legal cases filed by people who alleged several types of exploitation, financial service providers cut off Pornhub. That triggered Mindgeek into deleting most of the unverified content, and led to the implementation of a far more stringent age/ consent verification process.

On OF, content creators clearly get a better deal. They control their own content; generate recurrent revenues; connect confidentially to clients. But OF has also run into issues of age/ consent verification with recent reports that some of the content may be violative of either, or both these norms. Privacy may make it easier to fly child porn under the radar, for instance.

Concerns about trafficking of women and exploitation of minors have led to calls by many members of the US Congress for an investigation of OF. The financial service providers have also become warier because they could be sued as well. So OF announced that it would lower the boom on explicit content (not nudes) but then it backtracked.

Just a few organisations issue and verify all the world’s credit cards. American Express and Stripe won’t process adult content at all, while Mastercard and Visa blocked Pornhub in 2020 after the accusations. Many banks are uncomfortable with adult websites holding accounts. The OF saga has led to sex-workers looking at cryptocurrency as an alternative. This could mean another driver for the adoption of these new age assets.

Ideally, this churn will lead to the sex work industry putting stronger age/ consent verification models in place. Otherwise, we could see sex workers driven underground, and forced into more dangerous behaviour to continue earning a living.