So let’s say hypothetically, you’re an especially on-line billionaire who simply purchased a social media platform for $44 billion, a purchase order you presumably remorse given the truth that you spent months in authorized limbo attempting and failing to get out of the deal. You’re in all probability questioning how one can flip an organization that operated at a $270 million loss final quarter right into a enterprise that’s really price your vainness buy.
What sells quicker on the web than porn?
Twitter is engaged on a characteristic that will permit creators to monetize paywalled movies, the Washington Post reported. Reverse engineer and app researcher Jane Wong additionally reported that Twitter is engaged on a paid DMs characteristic.
The mockups of those paid options look much like OnlyFans, and Twitter has already demonstrated that it’s maintaining a tally of OnlyFans’ enterprise. Before Twitter carried out the Super Follows characteristic, Wong posted a leak exhibiting that the characteristic was being constructed with grownup content material in thoughts.
Twitter already permits customers to submit grownup content material, however they haven’t been allowed to monetize it — what if with these new options, that grew to become attainable? That plan may look like it comes out of left discipline, nevertheless it’s arguably a greater thought than charging individuals for a blue test.
“Pre-Musk acquisition, I would have said it’s impossible,” mentioned Ashley, a intercourse employee and peer organizer who works on circumstances involving content material moderation.
Many creator platforms don’t even attempt to monetize grownup content material because it’s such a authorized and regulatory minefield. But the wealthiest man on the earth goes to get extra leeway than your common tech founder, and we all know that Musk doesn’t play by the identical guidelines as everybody else. To safe his Twitter takeover, Musk leveraged relationships with banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America — banks that at the moment are additionally on the hook if he can’t squeeze worth out of Twitter.
“He’s in this social in-group that includes all the usual suspects that pressure companies to dump adult content,” Ashley defined. But she thinks that as a result of he’s a part of their world, they is perhaps extra prepared to cooperate with him. “He’s entrenched in this entire ecosystem of venture. He’s their guy.”
Still, determining tips on how to safely and securely monetize grownup content material is likely one of the trickiest questions on the web, to not point out one which requires a variety of nuance, empathy and understanding for notably weak individuals — one thing Musk has confirmed he can’t deal with. But if he can rent the correct workforce to construct out a product with security and safety on the forefront, grownup content material might be Musk’s greatest wager to recoup his funding.
Twitter is uniquely positioned to undercut OnlyFans
Twitter is the one main social media web site that enables customers to submit porn. So, for on-line intercourse staff, Twitter has traditionally functioned as an promoting software for his or her OnlyFans accounts. But what if these creators may simply monetize on-platform and bypass the friction of sending followers elsewhere?
“Sex sells” isn’t a cliche for nothing, and OnlyFans’ financials show it. In 2021, the corporate earned $433 million in pre-tax revenue, up from $61 million in 2020. The firm makes its cash by taking a 20% lower of all funds to creators — since 2016, the corporate has paid out $8 billion to creators, with $4 billion of that paid out in 2021 alone.
The marketplace for on-line intercourse work is massive sufficient that it may compensate for the fallout from advertisers.
For comparability, the extra mainstream creator monetization platform Patreon has paid out $3.5 billion to creators because it was based in 2013. Put it this manner: OnlyFans paid more cash to creators in 2021 than Patreon has paid out in its existence. That’s as a result of there’s a basic distinction between the 2 corporations’ enterprise fashions: One found out tips on how to monetize porn regardless of stress from bank card corporations, and one bowed out of the grownup realm altogether.
This isn’t the primary time Twitter has thought-about pivoting to porn. According to a report from The Verge, Twitter labored on an grownup content material monetization challenge this previous spring, which might have constructed upon its not-very-lucrative creator merchandise like Super Follows. But when a safety workforce pressure-tested the product, they wrote in a report that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.” When Musk proposed his buyout weeks later and threw your entire firm into disarray, the challenge was placed on maintain.
Twitter shouldn’t develop its grownup choices if it may’t adequately shield customers from abusive materials — plus, it might want to match the identical safety checks that OnlyFans has. OnlyFans is a very 18+ platform, and to ensure that creators to add their content material, they have to submit documentation to confirm that every one individuals depicted are 18+ and have offered written consent.
Can Twitter safely monetize porn?
Here’s the place the plan will get murky. Do we belief an Elon Musk-run Twitter — or any iteration of Twitter, actually — to promote grownup content material in an moral manner? Is it attainable for Twitter to average content material nicely sufficient to ensure that solely opted-in adults are seeing porn on the platform, and that the platform doesn’t inadvertently find yourself internet hosting and even monetizing youngster sexual abuse materials (CSAM)?
“Twitter has so much work to do to ensure that it is following the same best practices to moderate their content that we hold women-owned adult platforms to,” mentioned a workforce member at Amefist, a ladies’s digital safety platform. “Before they pivot to adult content, it would be a more refreshing and impactful change to address the way they moderate currently, and work to fight the distribution of CSAM before they make sensitive content a part of their business model.”
U.S. federal legislation requires that web corporations report every occasion of CSAM they encounter on their platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). In 2020, NCMEC’s information confirmed that Twitter made about 65,000 stories — for comparability, Pornhub guardian firm MindGeek made 13,000 stories.
Musk doesn’t appear to care a ton about platform security, so it’s laborious to be optimistic. Even in a pre-Musk period, Twitter has confirmed insufficient at stopping the unfold of dangerous content material. But if he desires to pay again his buyers and make his $44 billion nightmare a dream, he might need no selection.
“The humor is not lost on me that the richest man in the world needs money fast and has turned to sex work, just like I have,” Ashley informed TechCrunch. “If I were OnlyFans, I’d be terrified.”