No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.

Hi, just to sate my own curiosity: can you please provide me a link to this presentation, if it's available online? Thanks...

Not online, sorry!

> OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system

This is by far the most mind-blowing thing about OnlyFans to me. I’m a very open minded person and I would have been so sure that a site like OnlyFans would absolutely require discovery. Like, so sure that if I was making it, I wouldn’t even question including it. The fact they just offloaded this to every other site, and then took all the monetization is amazing to me. Twitter, Reddit and Instagram can barely get money from these users, but they’re super popular, and they just link to their OnlyFans on their profile.

I seriously wonder what other opportunities like that are out in the wild.

They also centralize all the risk. Operating a “pay me $X/month” service is really complicated legally, ethically, etc.

In a way, OF is valuable to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, because it has monopolized a lot of the riskiest cash flow that those companies would prefer to avoid / explicitly disallow in their ToS for a “subscribe to this influencer” service.

If OF had their own discovery platform, they’d have to deal with the thorny editorial problem of ranking. In the current setup, they can totally sidestep it. It would probably cost them more to operate discovery than it’s worth.