Amelia Gentleman

Periodically, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard will...

threaten to turn off their payment processing business if there is robust evidence that any of the content that's being sold on the site is illegal.

And there have been historically, there have been some breaches.

But nevertheless, it's a business that operates in an area that can become risky.

And there is always the risk of banks and credit card operators deciding that they no longer want to operate with the business.

And that would be catastrophic.

And also, there's no doubt that AI is going to be a huge disruptive force in pornography globally.

I went to a conference in the autumn where I saw the beginnings of incredibly sophisticated AI girlfriends and AI models who perform the commands of internet users at the click of a button.

I think probably we're still a few years off that being an existential threat for OnlyFans, but it's certainly something that the people in the industry are very much aware of and anxious about.

There is a desire to say this is a social media company, that it's a business that rests on the empowerment of women, allowing women to make money from...

taking their clothes off in a way that is sex positive and liberating and isn't something that we should feel concerned about in a progressive society with open-minded views about sex.

That's one side of the argument, I suppose.

But there is a conservative and also a feminist pushback to that that says, actually, even if you're paying the content creators on this site, even if you're allowing them to take 80% of the revenues generated, and even if a small number of women are becoming extremely rich on the back of that work,

There is still an argument that this perhaps isn't the greatest business to be involved with, that it is exploitative towards women, that it's grooming an entire generation of women to believe that self-objectification is an easy way to make a lot of money.

And I think there's a lot of queasiness about the business models.

So although we see a lot of kind of very successful women talking about how much money they've made on the site, there's another story that talks to a long tail of people who have gone on the site and performed explicit acts and perhaps haven't made very much money.

So not everybody thinks that this is an incredible tech business that they will want to invest in.