My youngest child sends me articles on occasion for this newsletter (the image above is him in his new dorm room). The first one he sent as a gag and told me not to publish it, but I hadn’t heard about it before. Last month, Snoop Dogg recorded a six-hour Twitch stream muted. That’s right, none of his fans could hear him and Snoop didn’t know. Just something to keep in mind when you make a stupid mistake with your content. Even Snoop makes mistakes.
But the real story my son wanted published is this presentation from Patreon CEO Jack Conte on adjusting your packaging. This video is eight minutes long and worth the watch (there is some NSFW language).
It’s a great talk and truly inspiring, but it resonated with me this week because I had three separate content creators ask me for advice. Each one was putting in the work. Each one had incredible passion and expertise. And each one was struggling to make a living.
All their problems were in the packaging. In how they presented themselves. In choosing the right key words. In focusing on less and not more. In choosing to be an expert in one thing instead of many.
Maybe this is your issue as well?
If you want to listen to a great overview dealing with this on goal setting and building an audience, check out my interview with Ash Roy on the Productive Insights podcast.
Don’t Build on Rented Land
OnlyFans started as a content subscription service about five years ago. It allows content creators to receive money from fans as one-time tips, pay-per-view or monthly subscriptions. There are a lot of musicians, physical fitness experts and more who use the channel, but it’s core user base are not safe for work (NSW) creators, sex workers, porn stars or other creators that show nudity or sex acts.
These adult content creators helped turn OnlyFans into a multi-billion dollar company. It literally prints money.
Last week OnlyFans announced that certain sexually-explicit content would not be allowed anymore. This decision crushed many content creators’ livelihoods.
Regardless of how you feel about OnlyFans from a moral perspective, this happens all the time. Content creators need to stop being surprised, and those OnlyFans creators who built an audience there needed to be working on a Plan B (a web property they could control).
This is just another move by a platform that has every right to change the rules as they see fit. Facebook used to show all our posts to people that liked our page, but now they don’t. Twitter can kick people off its platform for all kinds of reasons. Google Plus, oh…Google Plus shut down.
I wrote a full article on The Tilt about this. This will happen again. Over and over. For years. If you create content for yourself or for a company, you need to create a better strategy now.
Oh…and after I wrote this entire section of the newsletter, OnlyFans basically comes out and says never mind…everything will go back to the way it was. Here’s their statement:
“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.”
As Roy Kent would say…Oi! Just another example that show what these platforms really care about.
Because of the Banks
Now, you may be asking why OnlyFans originally made this move. According to CEO Tim Stokely, it was because of the banks. Basically, more and more banks were threatening to stop doing business with OnlyFans, citing “incidents of illegal content.” So, in order to keep the money coming in, OnlyFans was forced to make this decision.
We will see how this all plays out, but a couple things.
This is why I’m such a believer in Bitcoin (check out my issue on Superior Money). In the near future the payment rails for Bitcoin should be more mature and be able to handle these transactions instead of a bank. Peer-to-peer transactions (without a middle layer) will be mainstream very soon.
OnlyFans is being made an example of. Frankly, Facebook is the largest (by far) platform where “incidents of illegal content” occur. In 2020, Facebook reported more than 20 million child sexual abuse images, but you don’t see the banks pulling their liquidity when Facebook isn’t working hard enough to get rid of this (probably because they all own Facebook stock).
Something just doesn’t smell right here. More to come.