Onlyfans and Piracy

FartsUnited@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 140 points –

I'm curious to know how Onlyfans has managed to thrive in the era of online free content and piracy.

I mean, why would anyone want to pay for pron when it is readily accessible or available?

And how has Onlyfans content somehow managed to escape being pirated (or has it being ripped and shared online too)? If it is being shared or is readily available, do most people not know they can also source this content free?

I suppose I'm just curious to understand the pron ecosystem and how onlyfans content has somehow circumvented the perceived pitfalls of piracy.

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OF sells parasocial relationships

Exactly, people aren't paying for pics, they're paying to interact with the models

Which is honestly really fuckin sad when you think about it.

Not really, have you met people? Sometimes the distance of an internet connection is required to interact socially without crippling anxiety. At least here girls are getting paid to help these people instead of them going out and trying it in the outside.

Let's not pretend that the customers are being "helped" here. They are getting a thing they crave, but that doesn't mean they are personally benefiting

The vast majority of the popular accounts are not run by the women on the profile. Most of them pay friends or agencies to manage the page for them, they simply show up to photo shoots every now and then and enjoy the easy money.

A few articles I’ve seen in my feed show how more successful ones hire essentially VAs to respond to messages and chat for $18+ hour. It’s really quite amazing.

And you'd need to convince the customer to share the pics to have a parasocial relationnship together.
If you'd ask for the pics based on "fuck the talent/artist. Let's share those pics for everyone" they'd very likely respond with "fuck off".

And how has Onlyfans content somehow managed to escape being pirated

It hasn’t. Just check torrentgalaxy.

Well I need to investigate this for, uh, important research purposes...

I just had some success on a website I found called influencers gone wild

Right you're going to masturbate. Got it, thanks for sharing

You can take the Redditor out of Reddit, but you can't take the Reddit out of the Redditor.

You don't even need to torrent it, there's a couple of webpages that just have community uploaded only fans content. Like you can just lookup the person you're interested in and most of their content is there for free

Literally in a Telegram group that uploads the entire content of 5 not yet uploaded creators every week. At least that's what they adviertise andnhave so far delivered. "WHAT THA FUCK" "Holy shit, yo what's the matter? Whats happened? What's going on?” " THERE'S SO MUCH PORN"

Pretty sure it's the same one I'm in, too. They also take requests, so if there's anything they don't have yet, you can just ask, and it'll be uploaded for everyone within a few hours.

Not a connoisseur, so take what I say with a grain of salt but... Isn't the appeal of it, the significant personal interaction? You can't get that by ripping a couple vods. The ability to live chat (and throw paid messages their way), and have them respond, seems irreplaceable.

And ultimately to be replaced by chatbots without them knowing.

That's interesting. So the main attraction (so to speak) is the illusion of intimacy or personalisation. The actual pron just enables or caters to the illusion ?

If Onlyfans is pirated, though, it seems to miss the main appeal of it. Nonetheless, are there dedicated trackers or search engines for the content, and does the content also give an indication of the 'personal' interactions?

Not much difference between strippers and onlyfans models, just a computer. Both are just doing what it takes to get more money out of the simp.

Listen, OnlyFans isn't porn. It's something entirely different.

Let me explain. You remember when you first saw a porn vid and immediately envisioned yourself fucking the woman in place of the guy?

Well now, there is no guy. It's just her. And she's only interested in you, and she's not just being naughty with you and surprising you with nudes (sometimes free ones - sometimes very naughty free ones), but she's also asking how your day was and telling you good morning and good night every day to the point that you almost believe her when she says your dick is so huge and she wants it inside her...

You starting to get the picture? Porn is free because it's porn. That's not porn, that's an experience.

Also sad and pathetic...

To be frank, I think the victims of the epidemic of loneliness that plagues our society is nothing to look down upon.

Why would you assume I was talking about the people? So you could pretend to be superior somehow? I was saying the same thing you claim to be.

I'll be honest that's the way I read it too, probably because that's the general response you tend to see.

Calling people pathetic for looking at porn is pretty much textbook "pretending to be superior"...

Glass houses or what have you.

Except I didn't call them pathetic, you chose to read it that way. The actual words don't say that. Which won't mean anything to you as you've already demonstrated your inability to understand.

OnlyFan contents are pirated and shared on a daily basis as any other media. But because there are not many requests for it (also since consuming directly on OnlyFan hits differently, as you talk with the actual girl), and in part because of NSFW nature, you will find them only if you actually search for them.

Sure thing, you will never encounter this kind of content on common NSFW websites 😁

i'd be surprised if you're actually talking to the actual person making the content and not an assistant they pay to manage DMs & "fan" interactions.

Src: a friend is an OF creator who has shared that a lot of the creators usually pay for some sort of account management service after a certain level of notoriety.

I agree 100%, most messages are just bots, and now with the surge of AI it will be much harder to distinguish a real person from a computer.

OnlyFans is hugely pirated. But they will do well for two reasons. The first is that their service is good and easy. The second is that customers know that their money is motivation. Without their subscriptions, the models won't make content.

Personalized and specialized content seems to factor into it.

Often it works out where someone pays a large sum for a specific piece of content. Afterward a gallery or video is posted for subscribers or individual purchase for much smaller sum, which gets pirated, but the real money is already kinda made.

This is based on a friend of mine relating how their sister makes a living off OnlyFans.

Most people are much more willing to pirate from a global megacorp than from an actual human person.

This. OnlyFans is the "farm to table" of the porn industry and people feel differently about stealing from a small family farm than they do from Walmart.

Also, beyond just the guilt aspect, that same "farm to table" principle also means that a lot of people see OnlyFans as a fair and reasonable exchange with minimal unnecessary exploitation. Paying a major porn company feels scummy and gross and may make you feel complicit with the various evils of the industry; subbing to an OnlyFans can feel more like a donation to a creator who makes content you enjoy.

I regret to make you aware of a comment above in this very thread from someone trying to do exactly that.

The piracy bugbear has been raised as the reason why corporations aren't selling enough since mp3 was invented back in the day. It isn't always the case. OnlyFans is pirated but the piracy doesn't affect their bottom line enough to drive them out of business. If you think about it, lots of pornography on the internet is free, and they're still okay. It's a much more nuanced discussion than "piracy is stealing" than the corporations want you to think it is.

Edit: if I had to guess, the niche they serve or the value they add on top of "just porn" is something their customers are willing to pay for.

Ah that actually makes a lot of sense.

You don't pay for the porn, you pay for the interaction, seeing a different side of a public person or for the feeling of knowing a secret.

Btw just to make sure, I am not being ironic here I actually never thought of it that way.

Way further back than MP3’s even. The music industry had a whole ad campaign about how cassette tapes were going to kill music when they came out lol. Then they freaked out again with DAT tapes and then CD-Rs. Amazing how there’s still new music today…more than ever in fact.

I have no idea about how that industry works, but I guess piracy is not really driving stuff out of business elsewhere either.

Most people don't pirate. If piracy could drive companies out of business, gaming would be dead, especially indie gaming.

There is a lot of unique creators on OF and unless you have thousands of subscribers you probably aren't going to be able to find pirated content easily. Also you can get custom content and talk directly to the creator . And from knowing people personally it's alot more work than you think to make money on OF .

*talk directly to their content manager

Why pay for video games when

  1. Lots of free video games exist, and
  2. The paid video games can be pirated

The answers are;

  1. The free games and the paid games are not identical. There are differences between Genshin Impact and Breath of the Wild. However, both games are great, and both have their own userbase.
  2. If the game price is reasonable, it is more convenient to buy the game than pirate it.

You can swap video games with literally any digital product, including porn.

Y'know I think another possible analogy here might be the difference between a videogame and a tabletop game. Especially if we compare RPGs specifically.

It's one thing to play a computer RPG. It's another thing to play with a human GM who can reshape the story as needed and who can interact with the player in an open-ended manner.

I don't have access to their data but my guesses are something like:

A) Money isn't an issue for a large number of subscribers.

B) People like those specific models after stumbling onto them on reddit or whatnot. And while there are many other attractive women, the Onlyfans model is the one they like best.

C) Similar to gonewild, there's an allure to someone ostensibly being an amateur rather than a pornstar.

D) Laziness. I imagine onlyfans really took off during the pandemic. For those who don't really look at their credit card bills, I doubt there are other reminders.

Re B: personally, I do a lot of surfing on reddit and twitter for porn (and FA and e6 and...), and follow a lot of (irl, for this topic) people, curated over the last decade+; when I'm on the hunt for something/someone new, and they have an OF or other monetization system (donations/wish lists/etc notwithstanding), I lose all interest, regardless of their visual/kink appeal. I want to be seeing people that do this content because they actively enjoy it, not as a 'side hustle'. I want, I need those moans and squirms and cries of pleasure, to be genuine. And for a few of them, I want to be able to comment or say something to/about them (and possibly receive a reply), without the expectation of it turning into a financial transaction.

I'm one guy in a sea of horny people, but that's my take. I want horny because horny, not because ulterior motives.