Twitter and Elon Musk have a revenue problem. They also may have a revenue solution: porn.
Amidst hesitant advertisers, widespread layoffs, mass resignations, and Donald Trump’s recent reinstatement, many are understandably panicking at the possibility of Twitter’s demise. Long before Elon Musk became the Chief Twit, unknown writers parlayed dedicated followings into book deals. Marginalized identities found each other and formed cultural communities around hashtags. Small businesses and indie media outlets drove traffic to their sites and products. Many are concerned about what will happen to their livelihoods if Twitter (and $44 billion) goes “poof.”
To sex workers, this is nothing new. They’ve been on this ride before. With ever-changing community guidelines and targeted legislation, the adult entertainment industry is regularly booted from social media sites with little-to-no explanation, frequently building accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers before starting back at zero.
Twitter is one of two major social media sites (the other being Reddit) that still allows porn. A recent internal report estimates that 13 percent of Twitter’s content is NSFW. Many of those accounts monetize their followings by sending fans to other sites. OnlyFans reported $932 million in revenue for 2021 with creators getting paid out billions. That’s a lot of money not going to the Big Blue Bird.
Twitter’s Red Team
A “Red Team” of in-house researchers had been developing a way to cut in on that market share since at least early 2021. “Twitter loses a lot of revenue to OnlyFans,” says Dr. Olivia Snow, a dominatrix and research fellow for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She consulted with Twitter employees earlier this year on an Adult Content Monetization product. “So this was going to be a way to cash in on that.”
The idea was tabled back in May — a few weeks after Musk’s too-good-to-be-true offer to buy the site. But earlier this month, The Washington Post reported internal communications about a yet-to-be-announced “Paywalled Video” product that sounded a lot like OnlyFans: videos uploaded directly to a tweet with a blurred preview that arrives in your timeline with a pre-set price to unlock. The ability for creators to sell to their fans directly on the platform — and for Twitter to take a cut — has monstrous revenue possibilities for the struggling social media giant.
#PayForSomeOfYourPorn
Ginger Banks, who has been in the adult entertainment industry for 13 years, would be excited for paywalled video on Twitter. “I have 300,000 people following me,” she told Mashable. “It’s usually 1-2 percent that end up paying or subscribing [to my content]. It could be really big depending on how they roll it out!”
Porn stars already know a lot of great marketing ploys to get people excited to spend money on them: games, rankings, limited purchases, raffles, cross-promotional “battles.” With a payment method stored on the platform, fans could seamlessly spend with a click or two. No more #LinkInBio or subversive threading strategies to boost impressions for offsite URLs. If Twitter has skin in the game by taking a cut of sales, the company would have an incentive to give those tweets an algorithmic boost.
“I have more faith in Twitter and Reddit being able to monetize adult content,” Banks continues. “They have adult content and they’re in the fucking App Store. So, clearly, they have some sort of pull that these other websites don’t have.” Apple typically does not allow apps where pornography is freely available. (It’s why OnlyFans does not have a proper app.)
When the world shut down in 2020, waves of newly unemployed people tried their hands (and other body parts) at porn. “A lot of people now know they can turn to [porn] during a period of non-work,” says Lotus Lain, who serves as Industry Relations Advocate for the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade organization. Lain suggests if Twitter implemented the Paywalled Video product — and allowed adult creators to use it — newbies “wouldn’t even have to start an OnlyFans. It might be easier” to get your sexy side hustle up and running.
Everyone in porn I talk to says the same thing: The more places they can monetize their content, the better. “The thing that I’m cautious about is the lack of security at Twitter,” Lain told me a week after trust and safety head Yoel Roth resigned citing the new CEO’s “lack of legitimacy.” Lain continued, “I trusted whoever was in power before because it was a mixed group of executives. But now it’s one guy—one unhinged, megalomaniac guy. That is what I don’t trust.”
Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable
‘Elon Musk is obviously an idiot.’
Elon Musk dumped $44 billion into a pet project some suggest he never truly wanted in the first place. And he promised investors a return on their investment. Ninety percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. Musk wants to change that. But the ideas he has publicly floated have been all over the place from charging government accounts to bringing back Vine to launching an edit function for Twitter Blue subscribers (which is actually a good idea). His rushed rollout of selling verified badges for $8/month backfired so badly that it was shut down after two days.
Paywalled Video, if done correctly, could be a win for Musk, but an internal review deemed the feature as high risk due to concerns around copyrighted content, user trust issues, and legal compliance. Copyright concerns already abound since the CEO slashed his content moderation team last week.
“Elon is obviously an idiot,” says Snow. “He doesn’t understand what normal human concerns are in any way, shape, or form. Every time I press a button on Twitter, I hear a ‘boing’ sound and a spring pops out. Little things are falling apart.”
Snow has serious concerns about Twitter’s OnlyFans-esque product under Musk. “I think it’s super dangerous. I could see him going full steam ahead and launching a product that doesn’t have any content moderation built in — or even the staff to do that. I can’t imagine him being able to get the nuances of adult content or the privacy around it or the infrastructure necessary to make that work at all because he’s an incompetent sociopath.”
The nuances of adult content are many. Musk, a champion of artificial intelligence, probably won’t appreciate the creative complexities of porn that often trip up AI moderation programs. I myself had a video auto-removed from Instagram of me unzipping my fly and pulling out…a microphone. When I “appealed” the decision, it was quickly rejected and threatened with a ban. Anti-porn crusaders like Laila Mickelwait — who has posted child sexual abuse material directly to Twitter herself — have ramped up their push to scrub consensual sexual content from the internet. And since SESTA/FOSTA legislation put platforms on notice in 2018, social media platforms have cracked down on arbitrarily anything suggestive from sex educators to doulas to eggplant emojis.
Porn stars use these sites to build followings to funnel to monetized platforms, but they are routinely banned — even without sharing prohibited content. “The discrimination against sex work and porn is so institutionalized,” Banks offers. “There are so many walls, but all it does is force us to innovate.”
Of course, none of this matters if there are no users left to buy your porn. In the wake of Musk’s decisions about hate speech and reinstating Donald Trump, people have been fleeing Twitter for alternatives — newly-nude-again Tumblr, conservative Twitter clone Truth Social, or the allegedly “civil” new player Post. “I’ve seen what happens when new websites rush to fill a void,” offers Lain. “You get a lot of wack-ass shit that spreads everybody out. Mastodon is not real!”
Porn star Kendra Sunderland thinks Musk has made the site drastically worse. And with nearly one million followers, Sunderland, a nine-year industry veteran, feels stuck. “There’s nothing you can really do about [the changes he’s making]. You have to just get over it.” Her Twitter is the only social media account that has not been shut down throughout her career. “I can’t just leave Twitter. I have to use it for my work for as long as I continue in this industry.”
Sunderland added, “We’re all in a raft going down a river, and Elon is our guide.”
Wary allies to porn
Paywalled video could make a lot of creative people a lot of money, not just the naked ones. Behind-the-scenes content, exclusive video podcast episodes, woodworking tutorials, stand-up comedy specials. And yes, pictures of your favorite porn star’s titties. The product won’t solve the $44 billion pickle Elon Musk finds himself in, but it would begin making Twitter less reliant on advertisers.
Private conversations between Mistress Snow and one Twitter department head — in screenshots obtained by Mashable — suggest that the company does want to cash in on those OnlyFans fortunes. Even if sex workers have trouble believing it. “Because we don’t defend adult creators publicly, we are seen as wary allies who could switch teams any moment,” writes the employee. Snow requested anonymity for this employee so they could speak freely.
It doesn’t seem like Twitter will abandon adult content entirely. Its free speech fetishist owner would have a hard time explaining why the N-word is allowed in your mentions but cumshots are forbidden. But will porn be invited to the potential gold rush?
“My instinct is that they’re going to create [a way to monetize content] and we’re not going to be able to use it,” predicts Banks. “But I’d love to be proven wrong.”
