OnlyFans Says Never Mind On NSFW Ban

After six solid days of backlash from its creator base, sex worker allies, and the internet at large, OnlyFans has said “never mind” to banning sexually explicit content.

“Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard,” the company tweeted this morning. “We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change. OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.”

An official communique about the situation is en route to creators, it added.

OnlyFans didn’t provide details about what assurances it secured, exactly, but we’re guessing they’re “we definitely won’t blacklist you” guarantees from major credit card companies, banks, and other payment processors.

When it announced the impending NSFW ban Aug. 19, OnlyFans said it had made the decision based on “requests” from “banking partners and payout providers,” and said barring sexually explicit content was necessary for the “long-term sustainability of the platform.”

The company’s CEO, Tim Stokely, told Variety yesterday that banks including JP Morgan Chase, the Bank of New York Mellon, and the U.K.-based Metro Bank had expressed distaste with OnlyFans’ broad base of sex workers and the NSFW content they vend.

Those banks and others “cite reputational risk and refuse our business,” Stokely said.

As Variety points out, it’s possible OnlyFans was already in the midst of negotiations with banks, payment providers, and other players (like, say, potential investors), and its public ban announcement was an attempt to play hardball with entities insisting it scrub NSFW from its site.

If that’s the case, then the move may have paid off for OnlyFans with regards to payment industry giants and its newly secured assurances.

But at the same time, the company has likely done irreparable damage to its relationship with sex workers–some of whom have already been caught in the financial crossfire.

The top reply to the platform’s tweet about reversing the ban comes from Hexx Girl, whose Twitter profile says she’s in the top 0.9% of creators on OnlyFans.

“I call for a reduce in fees for all of us who have been affected by this,” she tweeted. “I’ve lost over 150 subscribers overnight but I’m still paying you the full 20% of my earnings?”

Hexx Girl added that the 150 subscribers she lost was just last night; the total lost since OnlyFans’ announcement is more than 500. A subscription to her feed costs $12.30 per month, so she’s out $6,150, before OnlyFans takes its cut. (To be clear, though, some subscribers may have been paying on multimonth package deals, which reduce the subscription price. So that number may be a bit higher than what she was actually projected to make.)

Numerous other creators replied to Hexx Girl and OnlyFans’ original tweet, saying they’ve also lost subscribers, and therefore income, since Aug. 19.

While we can’t know the precise reason why each user ended their subscription, there’s a good chance many of them did so in an attempt to support the sex workers that would’ve been affected by a NSFW ban. That support, though, has counterintuitively cut into creators’ bottom lines.

A number of creators also pointed out that OnlyFans chose to say it has “suspended” its planned policy change, not that the change is off forever.