The Rise Of 'Threads'= The Fall Of Fan Sites?
Fan sites have become incredibly popular since the pandemic. These sites have changed the adult industry, moving the focus away from the studio system and making creators into their own studios, with more control over the content that they produce and their income. However, the fan site model is far from perfect and a creator's success on a fan site largely lies in the hands of mainstream social media sites, who are not sex worker friendly.
So, why does fan sites' success rely on mainstream social media sites?
Firstly, with fan sites becoming a mainstream phenomenon it is important to debunk the most common misconception about fan sites:
One cannot just start a fan page, post feet pictures and make millions. Sorry to break it to you.
Most fan sites do not have a global search or discovery. What this means is there is no search bar where you can type in someone’s name and find their account, rather you need to know the individual URL code of the creator you want to find. Creators do not rely on the fan site to bring them traffic, the creator must bring traffic to their fan page. For that reason, this system favours creators who have large social media followings or celebrities who can then funnel their social media traffic over to their fan page. Therefore, if you decide to start a fan page and you have little social media followers, then you probably aren’t going to be making 200k a month.
Why do fan sites not have global discovery?
There isn’t a straightforward answer here. Indeed, it seems rather dumb as a company not to have this feature as it would probably increase traffic massively. But, there’s a couple theories (but not limited to) as to why there is no global discovery:
Fan sites were not built for porn
When fan sites first started they were not built with porn in mind, but rather for mainstream influencers, celebrities and more. But, porn took over. However, this leads to a number of problems because the sites were not infrastructurally built to handle sensitive adult content. This means that they do not have the correct investors, banking partners, guidelines, moderation services, payment gateways and more. Yet, since the companies grew so fast they didn’t have the ability to implement these safety systems with growth, in turn meaning that one cannot allow general discovery out of fear of what might show up due to a lack of proper and thorough safety. Similarly, some of these fan sites are in denial, still publicly trying to claim that they are not porn, therefore, they probably want to avoid general discovery for this reason.
Lack of incentive, lack of competition
The fan site space is heavily dominated by one or two companies. Therefore, due to a lack of competition there is less incentive to make general site improvements such as general discovery.
Do not want to have the traffic responsibility
Something that is amazing about the fan site model is that they receive so much traffic without having the responsibility to bring it to the creators themselves.
What role does mainstream social media play in this?
Since they can’t be actively discovered on the fan site, creators' fan site traffic comes from their social media. I.E. Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. However, most of these mainstream platforms are not sex worker friendly. They do not allow you to post any pornographic or suggestive content, and you are not allowed to link directly to a fan site. Instead you have to try to direct your fans to a link in your bio, such as a linktree, where they can then find your fan page. If you were to link directly to the fan page in your bio you would get banned from the social platform. Sex workers are constantly shadow banned and kicked off social media, and because of the reliance of these platforms for their income this is a huge problem.
Meta and Tiktok tend to be the most un sex worker friendly platforms, whereas Twitter has always taken a little bit more of a ‘chill’ approach. On Twitter sex workers can link to their fan pages, they don’t have to censor their words and can even post nudes. However, you can still be shadow banned. Therefore, this tends to be the most ‘reliable’ platform for the adult industry since it’s the least restrictive. Whether or not Twitter should allow this content without the safety infrastructure is another article…
However, with the future of Twitter remaining in question, and the rise of Threads one cannot help but wonder what will happen to the fan site industry? Meta takes a notoriously hard line on sex work, and will not be as ‘lenient’ as Twitter. So, if Twitter declines (or goes), and Threads becomes the new platform this will put millions of creators' income on fan sites in jeopardy. Even though fan sites have been great for the industry and creators in many ways, one cannot help but notice how fragile these sites really are, and the creators income which relies on it. After all, we’ve already seen how quickly that can be taken away. This begs the question of whether creators should rely so heavily on these sites and if an alternative is needed.