Published January 27, 2025
In the spring of 2020, as social distancing became the norm and almost the whole world retreated online, one industry particularly struggled to rework its business model: pornography. For its product, six feet apart might as well be six miles.
It didn’t take long, though, before the market worked its magic and hit upon a solution. A U.K.-based site, OnlyFans, had developed a subscription service for adult-content creators. With pornographic actors unable to shoot in the studio, many set up direct-to-consumer services on the platform. Meanwhile, with bars and clubs shut down, sex-starved singles quickly provided a surge in demand to match the surging supply. Between March and April, the user and creator bases both jumped by 75 percent. By the end of the year, the site had 85 million users and 1 million creators. Then a roadblock appeared: in 2021, after the company’s banking partners withdrew their services from the site, seemingly over concerns about illegal content, OnlyFans decided to ban its pornography. But content creators revolted, OnlyFans backpedaled a mere six days after the decision, and its meteoric rise has continued to this day, despite numerous reports of child exploitation and sex trafficking on the site.
From one perspective, OnlyFans is a textbook example of the market in action. Leveraging technological innovation in a digital age, it can respond almost immediately to tackle disruptions, match supply to demand, and maximize consumer utility. From another view, it is Exhibit A in the moral limits of the market, and the tendency of modern technology to hack the human person in the pursuit of profit.
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Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.