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Kate Linebaugh: A quick note before we start. Today's episode contains descriptions of sex work, and might not be appropriate for all listeners.The pandemic changed a lot of people's jobs, including Ayla's. for the past 10 years, Ayla's made her living as a sex worker. How do you define sex?

Ayla: So a lot of people use sex work to refer to anybody who creates any sort of sexual content to sell. So, this includes prostitution, this includes pornography. Also live camming, stuff like that. Selling nudes.

Kate Linebaugh: In March 2020, Ayla was working as an escort.

Ayla: So you can't exactly have a social distancing when you're an escort. So I was laying off the escorting work a bit, and around that time OnlyFans was starting to pick up.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans. A social media site best known for adult content. Creators can post nude photos, videos, and other explicit material, and charge followers a monthly subscription. For Ayla, it was a chance to work from home. So she set up shop on the site and started posting.Can you describe one of your favorite videos? Something that would be okay to air on this family podcast?

Ayla: So one of the things I'm most proud of is I'm a pretty good mine. So I do a mime routine where I, it's hard to describe, but I place a jacket on one of my arms to make it look like the arm belongs to somebody else, and then we can get a little freaky. But it creates this really striking visual illusion that there's somebody else there through the jacket, which I really enjoy doing, and people respond very well to it.

Kate Linebaugh: People responded really well to a lot of Ayla's videos. She's become one of OnlyFans' top creators. When she's working regularly, she told us she can pull in a $100,000 a month. That's a lot.

Ayla: Yeah, it's a huge amount of money. It's really spectacular.

Kate Linebaugh: But last week, OnlyFans made an announcement that could threaten Ayla's business, and the future of the platform itself. OnlyFans, a website built on sex, said it was banning sexually explicit content.Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Tuesday, August 24th.Coming up on the show, why OnlyFans is banning its most popular product, and what it could mean for the site and its creators.Our colleague, Georgia Wells covers social media, including OnlyFans. What is OnlyFans?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans is a subscription only social media site, with a twist. It allows adult entertainment. It's basically the X-rated Patreon, or the X-rated Substack.

Kate Linebaugh: How did this site begin? What's its origin story and where did it come from?

Georgia Wells: So, British entrepreneur, Tim Stokely, in 2016, he creates OnlyFans. And from the beginning, he had the idea that the adult entertainment market was underserved. So he starts reaching out to adult entertainers, individually.

Kate Linebaugh: Stokely would email these adult entertainers and ask them to come over to his new platform and bring their fans. He said he'd make it worth their while.

Georgia Wells: His pitch was, "On my platform, you can make 80% of the revenue that users pay." I've heard of other social media companies in the past brute forcing signups, but this is the most specific and direct I've ever heard of.

Kate Linebaugh: And do you have a sense of how popular OnlyFans was among creators?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans is huge among creators because it transformed, for many of them, their businesses. It's given them control over their content, over their career, in a way many of them didn't have control when they were working for porn studios. Or if there were sex workers, on the streets.

Kate Linebaugh: And OnlyFans' 80% cut for creators, a level that was unheard of in the adult entertainment industry, was a big draw, including for Ayla.

Ayla: It's the greatest cut I've seen on any sex work website. Any successful one, at least. Before OnlyFans, the industry standard was taking 50% or more. The very first website I started working for took 80%.

Kate Linebaugh: Over the past decade, Ayla says she's worked on several online platforms, and she's thought a lot about what makes each economic model pay off for workers like her. Take for example, Ayla's first foray into sex work, when she worked as a cam girl.What is a cam girl?

Ayla: A cam girl is similar to OnlyFans, but you provide a live stream. This live stream, it can vary on how accessible it is, but typically anybody can see it for free. Typically, the girl makes most of her money by accepting tips from people who are sending her money, live.

Kate Linebaugh: Ayla says she made good money camming, up to $10,000 a month. Though, it varied a lot. But camming had downsides. First, the camming platform took a hefty cut. Also, camming was labor-intensive. If Ayla wasn't live streaming, she wasn't making any money. And often, she says, her income dependent on a small number of high tippers, which she says has a lot to do with how camming works.

Ayla: When men tip you, they're not just trying to make you happy. They're also trying to demonstrate their high status in the eyes of other men. This is why very successful cam girls tend to use very masculine, competitive language like, "Oh, you're my king. You're my hero. Wow, you just beat everybody here." This language that's designed to foster this environment of competition between the viewers. That is what webcamming feeds off of, is the status play, which ends up resulting in the vast majority of your tips coming from the small percentage of men who can afford it. I think 80-90% of my income came from two to three people throughout the duration of my cam career.

Kate Linebaugh: Wow.

Ayla: This is very extreme, and it can be very stressful because your rent can depend on making like one or two people happy.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans solved a lot of those problems. Because Ayla didn't have to stream performances live, her OnlyFans content was less labor-intensive and could stay posted on the site for longer. And because OnlyFans is based on subscriptions, she could earn money from a wider audience.

Ayla: On OnlyFans, my top tippers, my richest top five tippers, probably make maybe 1% of my income. The difference in distribution is extremely stark.

Kate Linebaugh: You've talked about your work camming and your work as an escort. Did your work on OnlyFans feel more empowering, or how was it different from the others?

Ayla: It's so much better than camming. It's so much. It's more relaxing. You have more freedom, you get more money. You are less beholden to the three people who pay you the most and maybe they're angry at you one day and you have to text them frantically to make them not mad. There's a lot more emotional abuse that goes on in the camming livestream worlds because of just the way that the payments are structured. In OnlyFans, you're totally free of that. I'm free to tell even my high tippers, to be like, "... off" if I don't like this. I don't have to tout to their whims, and it just really distributes my income of much wider range of people, so that I'm much more flexible.

Kate Linebaugh: When you got this very successful business going on OnlyFans, what did it feel like?

Ayla: Absolutely fantastic. It was life-changing. Before that, I had been slowly growing a retirement account, but really worried because with sex work, you have an expiration date. A very slow, sad expiration date. And that was really stressful for me because it's like, I've committed my whole life to doing sex work and it's not like I have clear job options otherwise. I'm sure I could make something work, but it's still this strong not knowing.But with OnlyFans, I started finally making enough money that I realized, "Hey, I could probably retire in a few years if I kept this up." And that was a huge relief. I stopped worrying about my expiration date quite so much because I figured I probably could make it before I started showing visible signs of aging. I was really thrilled that it allowed me to move into a larger house. It allowed me to build up my savings quite a bit, to help my sister, for example. It was really wonderful.

Kate Linebaugh: Ayla had started on OnlyFans at just the right time. In the past year and a half, the platform's experienced massive growth. Here's Georgia again.

Ayla: OnlyFans was bobbing along, and during the pandemic, it caught fire. Everyone is stuck at home with nothing to do. They turn to their devices for entertainment.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans also got a boost from some key celebrities. Last summer, Cardi B announced she'd be sharing non-explicit behind the scenes footage from a music video exclusively on OnlyFans. And Beyonc name-dropped OnlyFans in the remix of the hit song, "Savage".

Beyonc: (singing).

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans has ballooned to 130 million users, and 2 million creators.

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans was riding this hockey stick of growth, and they've suddenly become a household name. I don't think we've ever seen an adult entertainment platform brand ever become a household name so quickly like that.

Kate Linebaugh: And then last week, OnlyFans made an announcement that could threaten all of that. Why the company did it? That's after the break.So, tell us what happened last week. What was the news?

Georgia Wells: Last week, OnlyFans announced it was banning sex.

Speaker 4: And OnlyFans getting out of the pornography business.

Georgia Wells: It said it would allow nudity, but sexually explicit content would be verboten.

Speaker 4: The company will prohibit sexually explicit conduct on its website.

Kate Linebaugh: Was this surprising?

Georgia Wells: Yeah, it's a company saying they're going to ban the thing they're known for. I'm struggling to come up with an analogy here, but it's...

Kate Linebaugh: It's like Burger King banning the burger.

Georgia Wells: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kate Linebaugh: Okay. So what has the company said about why it is making this move?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans has said that it's doing it because of pressure from banking partners and payment processors.

Kate Linebaugh: Payment processors. These firms facilitate the flow of money into and out of businesses. Whenever you buy something online or an online business pays a vendor, payment processors are involved.Why wouldn't a payment processor want to work with an adult business? Is it legal or is it moral?

Georgia Wells: There are two reasons. Payment processors, many don't want to handle content that can be, culturally, a hot potato. So many payments processors don't want contact with drugs, sex. But there's also legal issues around child exploitation that can happen on them sites.

Kate Linebaugh: And in recent months, reporting from the BBC has raised questions about how OnlyFans polices child pornography.

Georgia Wells: Last week, before OnlyFans said they were banning sex, the BBC released a report that OnlyFans has a strike system in which creators will get reprimanded before OnlyFans shuts down their account, demonstrating a degree of tolerance for certain legal content, including child exploitation. After that report, OnlyFans says, "Okay, you know what, no more sex."

Kate Linebaugh: When we reached out to OnlyFans for comment, the company referred us to an interview Stokely gave to The Financial Times. In that interview, Stokely blamed OnlyFans' banks for imposing obstacles that made it hard for the site to pay creators. Last week, OnlyFans also released its first ever transparency report. It said in July, the company had deactivated 15 accounts after finding images of child exploitation.Do you have any sense of why the payment processors acted now?

Georgia Wells: No, I do not know. But according to people familiar with the payments processors, it's their investors are the ones who were saying, "We want out of this business." There's a challenge around child exploitation and how seriously OnlyFans takes that challenge. And I think it's safe to assume that unless the investors or the payment processors are convinced that OnlyFans takes that risk very seriously, their motivation to not want to do business with OnlyFans checks out.

Kate Linebaugh: OnlyFans' ban on sexually explicit content will take effect October 1st, which means Ayla is thinking about her options.

Ayla: I'm stressed in maybe a different way than you might expect. In some way, I don't feel worried, because sex work will always continue. I still have in person work to return to. The problem is that I don't know how much this problem will follow us. OnlyFans solved a lot of problems for sex workers, but now it's subject to issues working with payment processors. And I'm like, "Okay, so if we move to a different platform and then that gets big, they're subject to the same exact problems with these payment processors." The issue is much deeper and much more systemic than OnlyFans. And so that's the thing that really stresses me out.

Kate Linebaugh: What could OnlyFans move mean for you and your business?

Ayla: I anticipate I'm going to make a lot less money now. I anticipate everybody who is working on OnlyFans who was relying at all on explicit content is going to see their income drop. I think even people who aren't relying on explicit content are going to see their income job because total traffic to OnlyFans is going to drop. And I'm not looking forward to that. I'm going to have to look at alternatives. I'm likely going to get back into in-person sex work after this. And I'm going to focus much more on distributing my platforms and my income, and not relying so wholly on one website.

Kate Linebaugh: Over the weekend, OnlyFans tweeted a message to sex workers, saying, "The OnlyFans community would not be what it is today without you." "We are working around the clock to come up with solutions."So Georgia, what do you see as the wider significance of this moment?

Georgia Wells: OnlyFans became mainstream in a way other adult sites haven't before, and it also pushed up against the limits of how our financial system works. And so, we're approaching this moment where we're going to get to see if it's possible for a site like OnlyFans to exist in the way that it has. So, I really want to see what happens there.

Kate Linebaugh: That's all for today, Tuesday, August 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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