I am not disagreeing, but do you have any ideas on how it is possible to run a business like OnlyFans and not have incredibly high margins? They are taking 20% cream off the top and do none of the content creation. The actual costs of creating and running a website like this get covered very quickly once you can generate more than about $50M in gross profits, which at a multi-billion run rate they certainly must do.
To run their expenses above their revenues would take a very special kind of incompetence or deliberate deception. For a legitimate business it would be nearly impossible.
I don’t know what the inner workings of the company look like, what things they have tied up to Onlyfans or how they keep their budget etc So it would all be speculation on my part. I do believe the platform’s success is very inflated from paid advertisement and publicity stunts. For instance, it is my educated guess models like Belle Delphine and that Disney star whose name escapes me were not really making the big numbers that were claimed and it was inflated from the inside for publicity. But again, no proof, just an educated hunch.
Here is the thing... companies speak through their actions. There is a way things are done normally and then there is abnormal behaviour. When you see a company take abnormal actions most people will simply react to the action by celebrating it or moaning about it. The smart move is to ask yourself what is behind it.
Onlyfans had 2 abnormal actions a year ago.
1) They changed their TOS to cheat their affiliates from their earnings. It used to be that if you referred a model friend you would receive 5% lifetime revshare on their earnings. One morning Onlyfans decided to take that away. That would have been kind of concerning in and on itself (what? You cannot afford 5% affiliate cut you gotta roll this back?) but it could also have been attributed in o simple greed and the fact that MFC’s owner doesn’t believe in affiliate marketing so perhaps it was a change in style. What was certainly abnormal and even bizarre was to apply the TOS change retroactively... meaning... they wouldn’t honor the accounts made while the lifetime revshare was in place. This is something unheard of in this industry and it forced you to ask yourself why they are throwing their credibility out the window so carelessly if they are considering this project long term. It showed me they were desperate to scrape as much as possible and perhaps they couldn’t make ends meet. However it was just one step and I normally wait for at least a confirmation of my suspicions.
A month or so later they rolled out the VAT scheme. Second abnormal step in such a short span. Here, they were going to continue to pay models 80% but would now charge users a percentage more for “VAT”. And the regular lemming would see this and think “great! They truly do care about the law!” Or “screw the Man! Fuck taxes” whatever. The smart person asks questions and peeks behind the veil. “What does it take to actually comply with European VAT for a business like Onlyfans?” And the answer would be... they would need to hire tax consultants for each country in the EU they were charging VAT for and then dedicating an entire new department to handle this since they don’t use payment processors, they handle it themselves. So you go look for what positions are available to work at Onlyfans and there’s 0 positions relevant to this huge VAT restructure. So you are forced to wonder if this is actually doable and if they plan on paying VAT or if there is something else entirely going on... and if this could be another way to fish for higher percentage payout disguised as VAT compliance and whether they will last a year or are just trying to get as much Mula as they can before they have to close up shop.
All speculation but so far my intuition and speculation has saved my ass from 3 different catastrophes. So I trust my gut always. I already got my Plan B almost ready because I spent the last 3 months working on it quietly as I knew Onlyfans was going down, and we still haven’t seen the end of this. There will be more.