I felt obligated to reply to this comment, because you're correct at interpreting my intent.
I should have been cleared with my numbers considering the audience (HN is a stat-aware place it appears!)
Both of my numbers were accurate as stated:
* There were 20K~ active creators.
* The average monthly payout was $5K.
HOWEVER, those numbers are not intended to be calculated together for a total payout valuation (doing that would assume every creator received a payout every month, which was not the case).
> c) Was this done as blackmail? There is a somewhat common dating site scam where someone gets you to friend them on FB, and then to sext with them-- then they threaten to send the material to your FB friends. I'd imagine OF girls would almost be a captive audience for this.
No, it wasn't blackmail. The creator never received any messages from the fan that went nuclear (they only know it was a 'fan' since they had the entire catalogue of pay-per-access content and some had very few purchases).
It seems they just woke up one day and said 'fuck it, time to wreck a life'. They persisted for a few months. From memory, they started with the creators LinkedIn account and then moved to Facebook -> Instagram -> mass emailing the creators 9-5 company.
The creator deleted most online accounts and started using an alias (which sadly the ex-fan also discovered and continued spamming).
> and lastly... I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room.
Yeah, I think you're on the money with your core point. Very few of the creators I interacted with directly seemed to be thriving in other parts of life sadly.
Not 100% related to the article, but directly related.
I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid).
Anyway, on to the comment at hand.
We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%).
We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated/distraught state (I'd occasionally get escalated calls to "confirm" that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept).
I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because:
a) A parent/relative found out.
b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account.
c) A 'fan' went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their 'normal' workplace, which was a local government).
We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites.
The revenue was nowhere near 1.2B.
(I wrote the below in another comment, but it's relevant to this comment):
Both of the claims in my original comment are correct as stated:
* Roughly 20K active creators (VAL_A).
* An average monthly payout to creators of $5K (VAL_B).
HOWEVER, that does not mean that VAL_A * VAL_B = total monthly payout. The below details are relevant:
1. Not all active creators made money.
2. There was a payout minimum (well, a free payout minimum, which the majority of users waited to reach).