Introduction

In 2023, OnlyFans paid $5.32 billion to creators. There are 4.12 million creators on the platform, with an average annual income of $1,291.

In the same year, the top 1% of creators on the platform took home 33% of the total earnings, and the top 10% took 73%. The remaining 90% shared only 27%.

These two sets of figures come from the same financial report and describe the same platform. One figure is used to promote the "Golden Age of the Creator Economy," while the other never appears in any official narrative.

3.708 Million People Sharing 27%

The official narrative of OnlyFans is "empowerment": creators break free from greedy agents and studios to own their audiences directly. This sounds like a decentralized revolution.

However, survey data from Influencer Marketing Hub in 2024 reveals another side. The bottom 50% of creators earn less than $200 per month, which hardly covers the depreciation of their filming equipment. The median creator earns approximately $180 per month. Most long-tail accounts have almost no income.

OnlyFans transfers all production costs, legal risks, customer acquisition pressures, and algorithmic fluctuations to the creators, while taking a 20% cut of the gross volume, bearing almost no content production risk. Traditional studios would at least bear the losses of a distribution failure; agents would at least share risks with the artists. The "innovation" of OnlyFans lies in completely severing this shared-risk mechanism: the platform always profits, while the creator bears everything alone.

This is the extreme form of the gig economy: workers not only have no base salary but must also assume unlimited liability for the right to work itself.

The essence of the so-called "empowerment revolution" is the transfer of risk.

The Stance of This Report

This report does not discuss whether creators "should" engage in this work. Moral judgments are almost meaningless when trying to understand an industry with daily traffic exceeding the combined totals of Netflix and Amazon.

Pornhub alone averages 115 million visits per day, more than the combined total of many mainstream news websites. The market size of this industry in 2024 is approximately $61.8 billion, exceeding the combined total of North American professional sports leagues (NFL+NBA+MLB+NHL). An industry that no one wants to publicly admit to consuming has a scale that far exceeds entertainment formats everyone discusses openly. If Pornhub were a public company, its market capitalization might exceed that of Netflix. But an IPO will not happen because no investment bank is willing to underwrite such an offering; the brand risk is too high. Ironically, the employees of these investment banks are also using Pornhub.

The following two facts will be presented simultaneously, and both are uncomfortable.

Fact One: Administrative bans cannot eliminate demand; they only push demand into more opaque underground markets. On January 1, 2024, Montana's age verification law went into effect. On the same day, demand for VPN services in the state surged by 482%. Policymakers usually ignore this metric, but the market does not. The effectiveness of a ban can be measured by VPN sales.

Fact Two: Laissez-faire cannot protect victims; it only systematizes harm. A 2025 report by the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) showed that AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) grew by 26,000% in one year. This exponential growth is not because human nature has become darker, but because the cost of doing evil has been infinitely lowered by technology. Generation speed is measured in seconds, while enforcement speed is measured in years.

This report does not take a side. The task is to disassemble the machine's parts and observe how the gears mesh, rather than arguing whether the machine should exist. If everyone is satisfied, this report has failed.

Industry Structure: A Mirror of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Understanding this industry requires an analogy. Forget the "adult content" label and imagine it as the pharmaceutical industry.

The structures of the two industries are strikingly similar. At the top are highly monopolized distribution channels: MindGeek (now Aylo) controls top sites like Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, through which more than 60% of global adult content traffic passes. This is identical to the landscape where the three major drug distributors—McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health—control 90% of drug circulation in the United States.

At the bottom is an extremely fragmented production end. The 4.12 million OnlyFans creators correspond to the thousands of small biotech companies in the pharmaceutical industry: all bear the R&D risks; winners are acquired or imitated, while losers disappear silently. No one writes an obituary for a creator who deletes their account after earning $108 a month, just as no one holds a memorial service for a small pharmaceutical company whose clinical trials failed.

At the terminal end are consumers who completely lack bargaining power. The pharmaceutical industry has patients' drug dependence; the adult industry has users' dopamine dependence. Both create near-inelastic demand curves. Price increases do not reduce consumption; they only squeeze consumer spending in other areas.

The only difference lies in the regulators.

The pharmaceutical industry has the FDA to decide which drugs can go to market and which must be recalled. FDA rulings can be appealed, hearings are fully public, and the decision-making process is recorded. The adult industry has no FDA. The de facto supreme regulators are Visa and Mastercard—two private companies that are not accountable to any voters and whose decision-making processes are completely opaque.

The events of July 2025 demonstrated how this power operates: Visa sent a compliance letter regarding "brand risk," and the Steam platform removed hundreds of games containing adult elements overnight. Itch.io hid over twenty thousand NSFW games from search results. There were no hearings, no legislative votes, and no public debates. Content creators did not even know who had sentenced them to death.

Freezing an industry's payment channels does not require three readings of a bill. Visa's brand protection department is faster, more effective, and harder to appeal than the U.S. Congress. Congress needs two years to pass an act; Visa needs only a letter and two weeks, and the decision is irrevocable. The efficiency problem of democracy has been solved by private companies using contract law.

Predictions for 2028

A verifiable judgment: By 2028, payment companies will completely replace Congress as the de facto global legislators for adult content.

The "brand protection policies" of Visa and Mastercard will determine what content can exist and what content must disappear. The enforcement of commercial contract terms is replacing the legislative process. Private companies will exercise the power of adjudication that should belong to public authority.

This makes free-market supporters uneasy: private companies becoming de facto content censors. It makes government regulation supporters equally uneasy: the legislative process is being completely bypassed.

After the Steam incident in July 2025, this trend has already become apparent.

The Reading Path of the Twelve Chapters

The structure of this report is not four parallel themes, but a causal chain: only by understanding the industry structure can one see the human condition clearly; only by seeing the human condition can one understand why social responses fail; only by understanding failure can one predict the future.

Chapters 1-4 explain how the industry operates. Free content acts like a predatory pricing strategy, destroying the survival space for middle-tier creators. What Napster did to the music industry is repeating in the adult industry, the difference being that this time there is no iTunes to save anyone. Understanding this structure is necessary to understand why 4.12 million creators share an average of only $1,291.

Chapters 5-7 show how this structure crushes specific individuals. In August 2024, hundreds of Telegram groups in South Korea were exposed for spreading AI face-swapped videos of high school girls. It takes 30 seconds to generate a "person" who never existed and 5 minutes to ruin a person who actually does. The industry structure dictates that the cost of harm approaches zero, while the cost of recovery approaches infinity.

Chapters 8-10 ask: Why are social responses ineffective? After 24 years of legalization in Amsterdam, 60-80% of sex workers are still "not entirely voluntary." NCMEC receives 36.2 million reports of child sexual abuse material annually, a 36-fold increase in ten years. Every policy claims to be "protecting," and every policy is failing. Failure is not due to poor execution, but because the root of the problem lies in the industry structure, while policies only provide surface-level patches.

Chapters 11-12 predict: When surface-level patches repeatedly fail, where will power flow? The answer has already emerged: Visa and Mastercard. The future of this industry does not depend on consumer choice or legislative debate, but on how the compliance departments of two credit card companies define "acceptable risk."

$5.32 billion, 4.12 million creators, $1,291 per person. Three figures from the same financial report outline the true silhouette of an industry: massive, extremely unequal, and invisible to the mainstream narrative.

These three figures are the starting point of this report. The following twelve chapters will explain how these figures are generated, who is profiting, who is bearing the cost, and where this system is headed.

Are you ready to feel uncomfortable? Please turn to Chapter One.

01. 350 Million Clicks

Every day, more than 100 million clicks flow to the same website, placing it 22nd in global traffic rankings. This is higher than eBay, on par with LinkedIn, and even exceeds the entire CNN network. Yet, if you flip through the annual special issues of Forbes or Fortune, you will absolutely not find this company's name. It does not appear on the big screens of Nasdaq, it is absent from business school case libraries, and it is rarely found on the coverage lists of technology journalists.

A company with revenue exceeding that of Netflix remains a blank entry on the Forbes 500 list.

Pornhub and the adult content industry behind it operate with an annual cash flow greater than Netflix's, all while "pretending not to exist." Mainstream society maintains a tacit silence, as if by not mentioning it, thousands of credit card transactions per second will simply vanish. To break this silence, one must first acknowledge an embarrassing fact: even the most authoritative statistics in this field can differ by a factor of eighty.

The Scale Fog: $62B or $1.3B?

Ask two economists about the size of the adult industry, and you might get two figures that differ by fiftyfold. An IBISWorld report estimates the U.S. adult industry at $1.3 billion, while SkyQuest, an independent market research firm, believes the global market reached $61.8 billion in 2024 and predicts it will surpass $100 billion by the early 2030s.

Why is there such a massive discrepancy?

It is not a calculation error, but a difference in defining boundaries. IBISWorld counts the industry as it existed in 1995: traditional production companies holding "adult film production" licenses, DVD sales, and dwindling cable TV video-on-demand revenue. Such an approach is like measuring the 2024 music industry by the output of vinyl record factories.

IBISWorld's data is actually tracking a corpse. The data is correct; the corpse is indeed shrinking.

The real gold mine migrated long ago.

In 2012, Los Angeles County passed Measure B, mandating that adult film actors use condoms. Legislators intended to protect actor health. The result: the number of filming permits in the San Fernando Valley plummeted by over 90%. Production companies did not comply with the regulations; they chose to migrate. By 2019, industry observers estimated that the scale of the adult industry in Budapest was comparable to the remaining capacity in California. Traditional production did not simply shrink; it was uprooted and reborn elsewhere.

IBISWorld is still measuring the output at the original site.

Meanwhile, new models are growing wildly. When the statistical scope is expanded to include subscription platforms like OnlyFans, adult toy e-commerce, live streaming tips, and private transactions on social media, the $61.8 billion figure actually appears conservative.

OnlyFans alone had a total transaction volume of $6.62 billion in 2023. The turnover of a single platform is five times the size of the entire "industry" as defined by IBISWorld.

Today, this is no longer an industry dominated by studios and directors. To be precise, that industry has disappeared. What is active is a different form.

The old pyramidal structure has collapsed: a few well-capitalized production companies hired actors to shoot feature films, distributors controlled the channels, and consumers bought the finished products. This model lasted for decades but dissipated within ten years.

A new ecosystem dominated by platforms, algorithm-driven distribution, and individual production is gradually taking shape. A three-tier structure is becoming increasingly evident:

• Traditional Production (shrinking, migrating, dying)
• Platform Monopoly (highly concentrated, with Aylo alone controlling 60% of traffic)
• Creator Economy (explosive growth, extreme inequality, with 4.12 million people sharing $5.3 billion)

The key to understanding this industry is not "how big it is," but "what counts as being in it." Measuring a new continent with old standards will only lead to absurd conclusions.

The Invisible Giant: Aylo and the Google of the Adult Industry

What would happen if a tech company controlled 60% of global search traffic, owned three of the top ten websites, and held vast amounts of user biometric data?

In 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google constitutes an illegal monopoly in the search field, a case that shook Silicon Valley.

In the adult industry, Aylo (formerly MindGeek) has achieved a similar dominance. The result: almost no one is paying attention.

This Luxembourg-based holding company owns core assets such as Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube, and Brazzers. According to SimilarWeb data, Pornhub's single-site traffic ranks 22nd globally, just behind Reddit and eBay. Aylo's combined websites account for more than 60% of global adult content traffic.

This concentration is similar to Google's share in the search market. The difference is: Google must face federal judges, while Aylo faces silence.

Why has no one sued Aylo for monopoly?

The answer points to a cynical "stigma dividend." Because legislators and regulators are unwilling to be associated with "obscene content," they have not only abandoned censorship but also neglected basic market regulation. If YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu belonged to the same parent company, how would the media react? Aylo has done the same thing, yet it receives only silence.

This regulatory exemption brings a fatal vulnerability.

When there is no government referee, enforcement power falls into the hands of private companies. Visa and Mastercard have become the de facto global regulators of adult content. These two companies have no electoral mandate, no legislative process, and no transparency obligations. For Google, a disruption in payment channels is merely a commercial dispute; for Aylo, it is a death sentence.

On December 4, 2020, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an investigative report titled "The Children of Pornhub," revealing the existence of videos featuring minors and non-consensual sexual acts on the platform. Within a week, Visa and Mastercard successively announced they would stop processing payments for Pornhub.

There were no hearings, no appeals, and no due process. The credit card companies simultaneously played the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

Make an uncomfortable assumption: if Visa decided tomorrow to stop processing firearm transactions, how would supporters of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution react? The same logic applies to the adult industry, yet no one protests. Not because the punishment is unfair, but because the subject is "dirty" enough.

Such risks lead the industry to rely heavily on cryptocurrencies and high-risk payment gateways. A vast commercial empire is built on a foundation of shifting sand. Payment companies can cut off the lifeline of any platform within a week; so-called "compliance" is only a temporary sense of security.

The Bottom of the Pyramid: The Real Income of OnlyFans Creators

In 2023, OnlyFans paid $5.32 billion to 4.12 million creators.

The average annual income per person was $1,291, a monthly average of $108, or about $86 after tax.

This is a far cry from the "empowerment" narrative hyped by the media. In that narrative, sex workers escape exploitative intermediaries and achieve financial freedom by facing their fans directly. OnlyFans is indeed more generous than Spotify: the platform only takes a 20% cut, while creators keep 80%.

But 80% of zero is still zero.

The data reveals an income distribution more brutal than Wall Street's.

The income distribution is extremely similar to that of the venture capital industry. There is an iron law in the VC industry: 10% of investments contribute 90% of returns, while the remaining 90% either go to zero or barely break even. The creator economy of OnlyFans replicates the same power-law structure, with one difference: VC partners use LPs' money, while OnlyFans creators bet their own bodies and identities. If a venture capital investment fails, one can switch tracks; if OnlyFans fails, what remains is a permanent digital footprint.

A survey by Influencer Marketing Hub shows that the top 1% of creators on OnlyFans take 33% of the platform's total income. The top 10% take 73%. The median creator's monthly income is only $180, or about $144 after tax.

In other words: the median creator on OnlyFans earns roughly the equivalent of an annual gym membership per month. The cost: privacy, time, social stigma, and content that remains on the internet forever.

For the vast majority of entrants, this does not even qualify as a full-time job; paying utility bills is a struggle.

In stark contrast are the myths of sudden wealth at the top. Bhad Bhabie publicly claimed to have earned approximately $59 million cumulatively on OnlyFans, and Bella Thorne reportedly earned about $1 million in her first month.

These figures are repeatedly amplified by the media, becoming marketing material to attract new creators. It is a lottery-style business model: using the stories of a tiny number of winners to attract millions of losers. The platform uses that 1% of success stories as fuel to attract millions of creators with gold rush dreams to contribute content and long-tail traffic.

A winner-takes-all digital casino. The structure is very similar to Uber and the food delivery rider economy: the platform takes a cut, while individuals bear all marketing, customer service, and legal risks. The difference is that OnlyFans creators also bear the lifelong cost of social stigma. A delivery job can be deleted from a resume. The history of OnlyFans, however, will be permanently recorded by the internet.

In August 2021, OnlyFans briefly announced it would ban sexually explicit content, citing pressure from banking partners. Within less than a week of the announcement, it was withdrawn following a strong backlash from creators.

This incident exposed the power imbalance between the platform and its creators: the vast majority of the 4 million creators have no bargaining chips; they can neither leave (other platforms have less traffic) nor influence policy. When the platform announced the ban, creators could only protest; when the platform withdrew the ban, creators could only say thank you. The initiative never rests with the laborers.

The digital red-light district has been gentrified. The landlords and a tiny number of star performers make money, while the rest of the tenants struggle.

After the Deletion: Second-Order Effects of the 2020 Great Purge

On December 14, 2020, under pressure from Visa and Mastercard cutting off payment services, Pornhub deleted all videos uploaded by unverified users overnight.

More than 10 million videos vanished instantly, accounting for about 80% of the content library.

According to conventional business logic, if any platform loses 80% of its inventory, its user base should collapse. If Netflix deleted 80% of its content, its stock price would hit the limit down before the market even opened.

Yet, this was not the case. According to SimilarWeb data, after the Great Purge, Pornhub's traffic ranking was almost unaffected, remaining firmly in the global top 25. This phenomenon reveals a frustrating fact for content producers: adult content is highly substitutable.

For most users, the remaining 20% of professional, compliant content is sufficient to meet their needs. From a commercial value perspective, most of the 10 million deleted videos were merely redundant noise. This discovery is cruel for content producers: in a market with severe oversupply, any single video, any creator, is replaceable.

Pornhub deleted 80% of its content and traffic did not drop. These words explain why the bottom 50% of OnlyFans creators earn less than $150 a month: industrial profits do not flow to labor; they only flow to platforms and a tiny elite at the top. The value of labor depends on scarcity. In this market, labor is the least scarce resource.

A deeper second-order effect lies in where that content went.

The deleted videos did not disappear with the delete key. Those videos containing piracy, surreptitious filming, or even worse content quickly migrated to small aggregator sites with servers in Russia or Southeast Asia, or those using cryptocurrency payments. These "neighbors" have no compliance departments, ignore takedown requests, and are not subject to Visa's payment constraints.

The "nuclear strike" by payment giants did indeed purify Pornhub, much like using antibiotics to kill a certain type of bacteria in the body. Other bacteria, however, multiplied even faster.

After 2020, the number of adult content groups on Telegram surged, and the activity of non-consensual content transactions on dark web markets rose. Suppressing one part only caused another to pop up.

This reveals the limitations of "payment weaponization": credit card companies can only regulate platforms willing to accept credit cards. When content moves to underground networks using cryptocurrency payments, the "moral power" of payment companies ceases to function. Visa and Mastercard did indeed change Pornhub, but they failed to change the content ecosystem of the entire industry. They merely moved the problem to places where regulation is more difficult.

An uncomfortable judgment: after the 2020 Great Purge, the total amount of illegal content on the global internet did not decrease; instead, it increased. It is simply distributed more sparsely, more covertly, and is harder to track.

The Next Pornhub?

The current prosperity of OnlyFans is built on a dangerous assumption: that the platform can forever survive under the "Safe Harbor" principle for User-Generated Content (UGC).

This is actually an illusion. As of 2024, the platform has over 4 million creators. Even with the most advanced AI moderation systems, it is technically impossible to accurately intercept all content involving minors or non-consensual filming within such a massive volume of real-time uploads.

More critically: OnlyFans' business model relies on the privacy of content. Creators send one-on-one messages, custom content, and live interactions to paying users. This content is bound in private channels that platform moderation cannot reach. This is fundamentally different from Pornhub's public content library.

The gap between OnlyFans' current growth rate and its compliance capabilities is widening rapidly. Such tension will eventually snap.

History has already provided a precedent. The trigger for the 2020 Pornhub crisis was a New York Times column, which sparked a chain reaction that changed the entire industry landscape within 72 hours. OnlyFans is larger, its creators are more dispersed, and its content is more private, making moderation far more difficult than for Pornhub.

Once a high-profile, malicious case involving vulnerable groups emerges, a storm of public opinion will force payment processors to become moral police. The New York Times has done it once; there is no reason it won't do it again.

Make a falsifiable prediction: before 2027, OnlyFans will encounter the same payment crisis that Pornhub faced in 2020.

At that point, OnlyFans will have to make a choice: either implement mandatory identity verification like Pornhub (which would make it impossible for long-tail creators to survive) or be cut off from the financial main artery. The scale effect of the platform economy becomes an Achilles' heel at this moment. The platform is too big to fail, but also too big to be ignored.

If this prediction does not occur by December 31, 2027, this part of the content is incorrect.

Structural observation is not a moral judgment.

The fact that the adult content industry is invisible in mainstream narratives does not mean its scale and influence have disappeared. Daily transaction volumes exceeding $60 million, traffic comparable to LinkedIn, a degree of monopoly comparable to Google, and 4.12 million creators sharing $5.3 billion—it is an invisible pillar of the internet economy that no one wants to mention at a dinner party.

The next chapter will look back at how this industry became a pioneer for every internet technology. From VHS to streaming to VR to AI, the adult industry has always been ahead. Not because of an innovative spirit, but because it was shut out by everyone else. An marginalized industry is forced to build its own infrastructure. Understanding this history of technology is understanding the hidden threads of internet business models.

02 Pioneers of the Dark Side of Technology

In June 2000, American Express announced it would stop processing transactions for all adult websites. It was the first mainstream payment company to completely withdraw from the adult industry.

Two years earlier, in 1998, CCBill had already been established, specifically serving high-risk industries. American Express's exit accelerated CCBill's expansion. Years later, CCBill became one of the world's largest adult payment processors. One company's moral purity catalyzed another company's business empire.

Six years earlier, in 1995, while the mainstream internet was still discussing how to turn a profit, Danni's Hard Drive was already developing streaming video technology. The adult industry did not become a technological pioneer because of a "love for innovation," but because it was shut out by everyone else. When no one is willing to cooperate, you have to do it yourself.

Mainstream payment companies refused to cooperate. Social stigma prevented alliances with tech giants. Regulatory gray zones forced the construction of self-owned infrastructure. Its marginal status instead turned it into an underground laboratory for internet technology.

Silicon Valley loves to tell stories of garage startups. This is another garage story, just one that will never be written into business school case studies.

The Myth of the Format Wars

Regarding the explanation of why VHS defeated Betamax, the most widely circulated version is: because Sony banned the playback of adult content on its devices, while JVC adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude, leading to a concentration of adult tapes on VHS, which ultimately established the standard for home entertainment.

This narrative is highly seductive. It simplifies complex business maneuvering into an ironic moral fable.

When searching for Sony's "official ban" on adult content, one finds that such documents do not exist. Sony was indeed cold toward the adult industry, but it did not set up technical barriers. What truly crushed Betamax were two hard metrics unrelated to pornography: recording duration and licensing models.

The Betamax, launched in 1975, could only record 60 minutes of video. This was more than enough for adult films, which were typically not long at the time. For an American football game, it was a disaster. JVC's VHS supported 2-hour recording at launch and quickly upgraded to 4 hours. For American families at the time trying to record TV programs to watch on the weekend, not needing to change tapes mid-way was an overwhelming advantage.

Even more fatal was the business model. Sony insisted on a closed ecosystem, attempting to monopolize all profits from Betamax; JVC opened licensing to any manufacturer willing to produce VHS recorders, such as Hitachi, Sharp, and Mitsubishi. By the time the video rental market exploded in the early 1980s, the market share of VHS players had already formed an irreversible network effect.

The adult industry did play a role in this process, but not as a decider—rather as a follower.

Steven Hirsch, founder of Vivid Video, once claimed that the company "pushed VHS harder than anyone else." This quote was later taken out of context as evidence of the adult industry's dominance. In reality, Hirsch was describing a keen business sense: the adult industry did not have capital like Sony's to educate the market; it could only survive by adapting as quickly as possible to the hardware users had already chosen. When consumers bought VHS because they could record the entire Super Bowl, the only choice for adult film producers was to stuff their tapes into that format.

The reason this myth endures is precisely because it satisfies mainstream society's fear of and fascination with the "power of desire."

Admitting that football games, rather than porn, decided the technical format is simply too boring. People would rather believe that desire changed history than recording duration.

Forced Innovation

If the adult industry in the format wars was merely a shrewd follower, then in the internet era, the adult industry truly became an inventor. This was not due to an enthusiasm for technology, but because they were backed into a corner.

Silicon Valley likes to talk about "Early Adopters," a group that usually embraces new technology proactively out of curiosity or strategic vision. The adult industry does not belong to this category. The adult industry consists of "Forced Innovators."

The difference lies in the power of choice.

When a mainstream e-commerce company wants to build a website, it can rent AWS servers, integrate Stripe payments, and use Akamai's CDN acceleration services. The options on the menu are abundant. For an adult website webmaster in 1995, all relevant doors were slammed shut. There was no menu, only a kitchen. If you wanted to eat, you had to cook it yourself.

In 1994, the Red Light District website went online. At that time, internet infrastructure was outrageously primitive—no YouTube, no streaming protocols, not even decent image compression standards. Mainstream tech companies were busy transmitting news via text and low-pixel images, while adult users' thirst for full-motion video constituted massive technical pressure. To transmit video over the snail-paced 56k modem networks, the adult industry had to develop its own compression algorithms and streaming players.

Danni's Hard Drive launched DanniVision in 1995. This was not just a video playback feature; it was a brute-force hack of the bandwidth limits of the time. By contrast, Hollywood did not begin seriously attempting to play video within browsers until several years later.

An even more extreme example occurred in the financial sector.

In June 2000, American Express suddenly announced it would stop processing all online adult entertainment transactions. This decision instantly severed the cash flow arteries of countless websites. Although Visa and MasterCard did not follow suit completely, they established strict rules for high-risk merchants, including high security deposits and account freezes that could be triggered at any time.

For Amazon, a severed payment channel is a bargaining chip; for the predecessor of Pornhub, it was a death sentence.

Survival panic catalyzed a Cambrian explosion of electronic payment technology. Third-party payment processors designed specifically for high-risk industries, such as CCBill and Epoch, appeared one after another. These companies developed early subscription billing systems, anti-fraud algorithms, and anonymous billing technologies. While mainstream e-commerce was still struggling with how to handle one-time credit card transactions, the adult industry had already built a financial fortress capable of automatically processing millions of small subscriptions globally while simultaneously fighting high-frequency refund fraud.

The purpose was never to "optimize user experience." It was "as long as we can still receive money, the business can continue."

Survival pressure is the best teacher. When death is the only alternative, the learning curve becomes very steep.

The Underground Laboratory

The relationship between the adult industry and internet technology can be accurately compared to the relationship between military R&D and civilian technology.

GPS, the internet, microwave ovens, and jet engines—these technologies that changed modern life all originated from military projects. The reason is simple: the military has massive budgets, extreme urgency, and a very high tolerance for failure. When survival is threatened, cost-benefit analysis gives way to technological breakthroughs.

The adult industry has played a similar role in the history of internet development.

Cash flow is a core element. Unlike most internet companies at the time that tried to survive through the "eyeball economy" and burning venture capital, adult websites were making money from the moment they went online. Users' strong willingness to pay provided ample ammunition for technical trial and error.

Tolerance for failure is another key factor. If a bank's website crashes, it is a major incident that makes the news. If an adult website's new video player stutters, users might complain, but they will certainly not leave because of it. The driving force stems from primal desire, rather than a rational assessment of service quality.

This created a unique testing environment: engineers could test unrefined code directly in production environments. If it crashed, users would wait five minutes and refresh. In a bank, users would call their lawyers.

In 1996, the adult industry developed early, sophisticated website analysis tools to track unique visitors and click heatmaps. This was even earlier than Urchin, the predecessor to Google Analytics. Adult websites needed to know which thumbnails brought clicks and which keywords brought subscriptions, because every millisecond of traffic corresponded directly to dollars.

This "dirty work" attribute made the adult industry a testing ground that mainstream technology was unwilling to touch.

When VR technology attempted to enter the consumer market in 2016, Oculus and HTC were cautiously marketing games and educational applications. According to data from Juniper Research, the VR adult content market reached $716 million in 2021 and is expected to soar to $19 billion by 2026. Just like VHS back then, adult content has become the invisible driver of hardware adoption, even if giants like Meta remain tight-lipped about it in public.

Sony's refusal to "officially" support adult content on Betamax back then was not out of noble moral sentiment, but because they felt that kind of low-brow content did not match the style of high-end equipment.

As a result, the market taught the Japanese giant a harsh lesson: when a new technology has not yet gained a foothold, it does not have the luxury of picking its users. VR is repeating the same script. Meta can pretend not to see it, but the market will not.

The Dark Side of AI

If the innovations in streaming and payment technology still carried a certain "outlaw hero" quality, the technological evolution of the adult industry in the AI era presents a chillingly cold aspect.

Public discussion of "Deepfakes" focuses primarily on the political sphere. The media issues endless warnings: fake videos of Putin could trigger wars, fake recordings of Biden could interfere with elections. Grand narratives obscure the true battlefield.

According to 2023 statistics, 98% of deepfake videos on the internet are pornographic content. Among these pornographic deepfakes, 99% of the victims are women.

98% and 99%. These two numbers point to an uncomfortable fact: the true driving force of AI deepfake technology lies not in subverting regimes, but in satisfying the desire for control over bodies in the private sphere. It is not a geopolitical game, but a way to strip the clothes off the girl in the next class.

Congressional hearings discuss Putin and Biden. Something else is happening on Reddit.

The speed at which the technical threshold is lowering is staggering. In 2019, producing a high-quality face-swapped video required expensive graphics cards, thousands of sample photos, and days of training time. By 2023, applications like "Nudify" could achieve one-click undressing. According to a report by Graphika, in September 2023, 34 NCII (non-consensual intimate imagery) generation services received a total of over 24 million unique visitors.

The trend is one-way.

In the past, technological innovation in the adult industry was to combat censorship and blockades; now, decentralized open-source AI models have made everyone with a smartphone a potential producer of pornographic content. This type of technology is no longer held in the hands of large companies like Aylo, but is scattered across GitHub code repositories and anonymous Telegram groups.

A falsifiable prediction can be made: before 2027, victims of deepfake pornography will expand from "celebrities + ordinary people" to "anyone with a social media photo." The technical threshold for generating a realistic pornographic video will drop to "mobile app + 30 seconds."

If this does not happen by December 31, 2027, this prediction in this report is incorrect.

In this new world, everyone could become part of the adult industry—not as a consumer, but as an unconsenting "actor." This is perhaps the darkest prophecy of the adult industry as a technological pioneer: it is no longer merely a testing ground for technology, but is turning the entire human digital avatar into a library of raw material.

From VHS to streaming to VR, the adult industry has always been an early adopter of technology. Now, this industry has become a creator of victims through technology. The same spirit of innovation, but with entirely different moral coordinates.

03 The Price of Free

On May 25, 2007, a group of college students in Montreal launched Pornhub. On June 29 of the same year, Steve Jobs in San Francisco released the iPhone.

Looking back fifteen years later, the reshaping of human behavior by these two events is on the same scale. The former turned a scarce commodity into tap water; the latter connected the pipes for that tap water to every pocket in the world. The combination of the two created a behemoth with over 100 million clicks per day.

What is the cost? An old world that has lost its ability to generate its own blood, and a group of people who never consented to being filmed.

From DVD to Tube

Napster destroying record labels and Pornhub destroying adult studios follow the exact same laws of physics.

When content is digitized and stripped of its medium (CD or DVD), the marginal cost of reproduction instantly drops to zero. This belongs to the realm of physics and has nothing to do with business strategy.

In the four years after Pornhub's launch, global adult industry revenue was halved from $20 billion to around $10 billion. Market demand did not shrink; in fact, it surged. What changed was the method of value capture. Studios that once profited from selling $20 DVDs found themselves competing with hundreds of millions of free pirated clips.

A free competitor cannot be defeated. No one can be cheaper than free.

The reconstruction path after such a structural collapse reveals the starkly different fates of two industries.

The music industry spent fifteen years building a streaming subscription model through Spotify and Apple Music, successfully pulling users back behind a paywall. Although the system built by Daniel Ek lowered royalties per play, it at least preserved the basic commercial contract of "platforms paying labels." The adult industry did not see its own Spotify. What greeted this industry was OnlyFans—a variant that seems similar but is actually much more cruel.

Why more cruel?

In the music streaming model, rights holders negotiate with platforms, and the risk remains at the corporate level. Record labels might see shrinking profits, but they remain record labels. In the post-free era of the adult industry, platforms stopped paying royalties to content producers and instead provided an interface for producers to beg users.

Tube sites under MindGeek (now Aylo) refuse to pay for content while controlling the lifeblood of creators through traffic distribution rights. The "reconstruction" of the adult industry is more brutal than that of the music industry: risk has shifted from companies to individuals. Individuals have no legal departments, no lobbying power, and no bargaining power.

Beyond the change in business models, it also marks a regression in labor relations.

Under the Spotify model, record labels are still capital-intensive entities with offices, lawyers, and unions. In the Tube model, every creator becomes an atomized individual responsible for their own profits and losses, trying to grab a few seconds of attention in the torrent of algorithms. No unions, no contract protection, no unemployment insurance. "Creator economy" is a nice name, but the actual content is: everyone is now a sole proprietor, good luck.

Who Profits

The narrative of "adult industry decline" has long occupied mainstream media headlines, but statistics can be misleading.

San Fernando Valley was once the global center of adult film production, employing about 10,000 practitioners in 2006; ten years later, this number had shrunk to fewer than 2,000. Studios closed, equipment rental companies went bankrupt, and makeup artists and lighting technicians changed careers. From this slice, the industry is indeed a ruin.

However, if the camera shifts to server rooms in Luxembourg and Montreal, the scene is entirely different. MindGeek established a near-monopoly traffic empire by acquiring Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. In 2019, Pornhub alone had an average of 115 million daily visits and 42 billion annual visits. Although financial details are not public as it is a private company, the ability to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and the massive global CDN costs suggest staggering profits.

The money didn't disappear; it just changed pockets. From many pockets to very few.

Traditional production models require high upfront costs (scripts, venues, actors, filming) and recover funds by selling the finished product. Profits are dispersed across the entire industry chain. The Tube model is completely different: it doesn't need to pay a penny for content production, relying on user-generated content (UGC) and pirated material to fill its library, then monetizing through advertising and premium subscriptions.

The rise of MindGeek demonstrates a cold business logic: when content becomes an undifferentiated commodity, the value of the creator drops to zero, and the value of the platform skyrockets. The core issue has never been about "industry shrinkage"; the key lies in "who profits."

For those studio owners who once held the power of discourse, losing income also meant losing the power to define "quality content." Algorithms replaced editors, click-through rates replaced reputation, and free replaced paid. In a perfect capital plunder, the winner takes all the chips, and the losers can only watch their DVDs turn into plastic waste.

Hidden Costs

Free is the most expensive pricing strategy. Costs are often paid by third parties without their knowledge.

In 2009, 14-year-old Rose Kalemba was kidnapped and raped by two men in Ohio. The perpetrators recorded the process and uploaded it to Pornhub.

Over the next six months, Kalemba submitted more than 50 deletion requests to Pornhub using different email addresses. All were ignored. The video title contained keywords like "teen," and it reached hundreds of thousands of views. Every view generated advertising revenue. It wasn't until Kalemba disguised herself as a lawyer and sent a legal threat letter that the video was removed.

A 14-year-old rape victim had to pretend to be a lawyer to get a platform to delete a video of her being raped.

Why weren't 50 emails enough, but one lawyer's letter was? The answer is cost-benefit calculation. Processing a complaint from an ordinary user yields zero revenue and costs customer service time. Processing a complaint from a lawyer's letter yields the benefit of avoiding a lawsuit (potential loss of tens of thousands of dollars) and still costs customer service time. Same customer service time, different ROI. Kalemba's problem wasn't about persistence; it was because she wasn't expensive enough.

In this system, a person's pain only has value when it threatens the company's balance sheet.

This is a systemic feature, not an isolated case. In December 2020, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an investigative report titled "The Children of Pornhub," interviewing several victims with similar experiences. Less than a week after the report was published, Visa and Mastercard cut off Pornhub's payment channels. Overnight, Pornhub deleted over 10 million videos, about 80% of its content library.

This unprecedented purge exposed a fact: a significant proportion of the deleted content had never undergone any human review. 10 million videos, assuming an average of 5 minutes per video, total over 95 years in duration. It is impossible to have enough manpower to watch them all.

Why doesn't the platform hire more moderators?

Economics provides the answer. The economics of the "free + UGC" model dictates this result. To maintain advertising revenue, the platform must pursue infinite traffic; to obtain infinite traffic, the platform needs an infinite supply of content. When anyone can upload videos anonymously and the platform doesn't have to pay for content, a massive influx of garbage and illegal content is inevitable.

The cost of reviewing one minute of video is fixed (labor cost about $0.50-$2.00), but the advertising revenue generated by that video may approach zero. This asymmetry ensures that platforms will always lack the incentive for moderation. As long as legal pressure is not great enough to shut down the servers, platforms will choose to turn a blind eye.

MindGeek's 2020 purge was actually a confession thirteen years late: the platform admitted it had neither the ability nor the will to moderate the content library that had long generated advertising revenue. Deleting 10 million videos usually indicates the bankruptcy of a video site, but in the adult industry, it was just a necessary cut to save credit card payment channels. This number itself exposes the toxic concentration of the original content library.

Victims are the ones bearing the hidden costs of this business model.

Rose Kalemba's six-month nightmare resulted in hundreds of thousands of clicks and corresponding advertising revenue for Pornhub. When content is free, someone is always paying for it. It's just that the one footing the bill is not the consumer, but those who never consented to being filmed.

Economics has a term called "externality": the cost generated by one party's behavior is borne by another. A polluting factory doesn't need to pay for the cancer of downstream residents. Free content platforms don't need to pay for the trauma of victims. When externalities are not priced, the market overproduces harmful things.

Scapegoat

Searching for simple enemies is a human instinct. For the adult film industry in Los Angeles, this enemy is called "Measure B."

In 2012, Los Angeles County passed Measure B, mandating that adult film actors wear condoms during filming. The industry reacted violently; the number of filming permits issued by Los Angeles County plummeted from about 480 per year before 2012 to just 2 in April 2013, and 26 for the entire year of 2015—a 95% decrease. Studios claimed the act stifled creative freedom and forced relocations to Las Vegas or Miami.

This causal relationship seems airtight: harsh regulation led to the industry's decline.

However, financial statements do not lie. According to data cited by Covenant Eyes and University Times, the precipitous drop in global adult industry revenue occurred between 2007 and 2011, long before Measure B took effect. By the time the act passed in 2012, the profits of the traditional production industry had already been cannibalized by Pornhub.

Measure B was just the straw that broke the camel's back, or perhaps not even a straw. It was more like a perfect excuse.

For studios, admitting that "the business model is obsolete due to technological change" is painful and unsolvable. In other words, admitting helplessness. Blaming "stupid and overreaching government regulation" is much easier, can garner sympathy, and allows for lobbying politicians.

The real killer had already slipped in five years earlier. In 2007, when the first user watched a full movie for free on Pornhub that originally cost $29.95, the fate of San Fernando Valley was sealed. Regardless of whether actors wore condoms, as long as 80% of users could access content through free channels, the commercial edifice relying on selling copies was bound to collapse.

Blaming Measure B is like blaming the sinking of the Titanic on the iceberg being too hard. The iceberg was the final blow that killed the camel; it had nothing to do with the responsibility of the hull design.

Legislators can blame regulation, and practitioners can blame policy, but no one wants to admit that the free internet killed paid content.

A collective conspiracy of misdiagnosis. Using a visible wound to cover up fatal internal bleeding. Measure B is the wound. Pornhub is the internal bleeding.

Traditional studios have collapsed, and MindGeek has become the traffic overlord. The next question is: when the power of content production shifts from companies to individuals, will the situation for creators be better?

The answer is depressing. The answer given by OnlyFans is even more cruel than the Tube era. Risk has shifted from companies to individuals, which has no meaning of liberation and is purely abandonment.

The Bottom of the Pyramid

In 2023, Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans' parent company Fenix International, received $472 million in dividends. In the same year, the average annual income for the approximately 4.6 million creators on the platform was about $1,570. One person's annual dividend is equivalent to the total annual income of 300,000 creators combined. Fenix International's pre-tax profit for that year was $658 million, and the owner took 72% of it. These are two sets of figures presented side-by-side in the same financial report.

To make an analogy: if Walmart distributed 72% of its profits to its CEO while cashiers earned an hourly wage of only $3, it would certainly make headlines and even trigger congressional hearings. At OnlyFans, this is just ordinary financial reporting. There are no protests and no widespread concern because creators are defined as "independent contractors," and this belongs to the "adult industry."

The Lie of Numbers

"Average" is one of the most deceptive concepts in statistics. When media reports that OnlyFans creators earn an average annual income of about $1,570, this figure masks the brutal power law distribution behind it. According to a cross-analysis by OFStats and Matthew Ball, the top 0.1% of creators (about 4,600 people) capture 76% of the platform's total revenue, with an average annual income of approximately $220,000. The top 1% earn about $49,000 per year. For the vast majority at the bottom of the pyramid, a monthly income of less than $200 is the norm. The median monthly income is about $180 (pre-tax), which leaves only about $140 after the platform's 20% cut—not even enough to cover the depreciation of filming equipment and basic online marketing costs.

This inequality is not merely the result of market competition but a reality distortion field shaped by platform algorithms and marketing narratives. OnlyFans' official promotion and media PR focus heavily on extreme cases like Amouranth, who earns $1.4 million a month. This strategy is identical to lottery advertisements: showing only the smiles of winners holding giant checks while never mentioning the millions of losing tickets in the denominator. Lottery bureaus at least print the odds of winning in small type on the back of the ticket, whereas OnlyFans packages this extreme inequality of probability as a universal opportunity for "content monetization."

4.6 million creators compete in the same pool for the limited attention of paying users. When a newcomer is attracted to the field by narratives of "empowerment" and "economic independence," they face an economy more polarized than Wall Street. In 2023, the number of creators grew by 29%, while transaction volume grew by only 19%. As more people flood in, everyone's share is shrinking.

The True Face of the Platform

The OnlyFans business model is an extreme form of the gig economy: the platform takes a 20% cut of the gross revenue but bears none of the risks commensurate with its income. Unlike Uber or DoorDash, OnlyFans does not need to maintain fleet algorithms, handle traffic accident insurance, or face complex labor law challenges.

In 2019, California passed the AB5 bill, attempting to reclassify Uber drivers as employees. Uber and other gig giants spent over $200 million promoting Proposition 22, successfully maintaining the definition of "independent contractors." In July 2024, the California Supreme Court upheld this ruling. OnlyFans did not have to spend a penny on this because no legislator would take the political risk of fighting for "employee rights" for a group that primarily produces adult content. This political isolation allows OnlyFans to maintain a contractual relationship far more stringent than that of traditional gig platforms.

The structures of both platforms are nearly identical: individuals bear all the costs of production materials, the platform takes a fixed percentage, income distribution is extremely unequal, and there are no benefits or protections. Uber drivers bear vehicle depreciation, fuel costs, and insurance; OnlyFans creators bear equipment, marketing, legal, and psychological costs. The difference is that Uber drivers at least have unions trying to fight for their rights and legislators pushing AB5, while OnlyFans creators have neither.

This asymmetry is particularly evident in risk control. When credit card companies (such as Visa or Mastercard) pressure for stronger content moderation, the platform transfers compliance costs to creators by banning accounts or withholding funds to hedge its own risks. Creators are not just producers of content; they are the shock absorbers for the platform against financial regulatory pressure.

The platform takes 20% and bears almost zero risk. Creators keep 80% but bear all the risk.

The Emotional Bill

The goods sold by creators on the platform are not merely nude images, but a digital simulation of emotional connection. The industry term GFE (Girlfriend Experience) accurately summarizes the essence of this transaction: subscription fees are often just the entry ticket, while the real profits come from customized interactions and virtual companionship in private messages.

This business model requires creators to perform high-intensity emotional labor. To maintain subscriber retention rates, creators must play the role of listener, admirer, or object of sexual fantasy in private messages, even if the person on the other end of the screen is a completely anonymous stranger. The emotional circuits of the human brain do not distinguish between physical reality and digital simulation. Users know the other party is serving others simultaneously, but the brain's emotional circuits don't care. For creators, however, establishing such long-term, high-density false intimacy causes real psychological wear and tear.

A 2021 survey by The Avery Center provided statistical data: 34% of creators reported negative physical and mental health impacts, including anxiety, depression, shame, and low self-esteem; 30% received threatening messages from the platform claiming their accounts would be removed if they didn't post new content; 30% were contacted by human traffickers attempting to manage their online accounts. These psychological costs are invisible and do not appear on Fenix International's balance sheet, but they are tangibly borne by every individual trying to pay rent through private message interactions.

Psychotherapists also sell emotional labor, but they have licenses, industry standards, supervision systems, fee schedules, and professional boundary training. Therapists are taught how to find a balance between empathy and self-protection. The emotional labor sold by OnlyFans creators has none of these protections. Prices are determined by the market, standards do not exist, and the psychological price must be paid alone. No one teaches how to say "I miss you" to a real partner with sincerity after selling it for the 500th time.

When the job is selling intimacy, how much intimacy is left for one's own life?

Easy to Enter, Hard to Exit

Registering an OnlyFans account requires only a phone, an ID card, and five minutes. Deleting an account is technically just as simple, but sociologically, it is often difficult to achieve.

Digital footprints are permanent and uncontrollable. Once content is uploaded, it can be scraped, mirrored, and permanently stored by third-party pirate websites. Even if a creator deletes their original OnlyFans account, cleaning up pirated content across the web through DMCA takedown notices is not only expensive but almost a guaranteed losing game of whack-a-mole. For young people trying to earn tuition during college, this experience may evolve into a serious professional crisis years later.

There are well-documented cases of professionals, including teaching assistants and nurses, being fired after their OnlyFans accounts were discovered. Analysis by the law firm Harper James points out that employers often use "reputational risk" or "codes of conduct" as grounds for legal dismissal. Even without a clear reason for dismissal, a two-year gap on a resume will trigger questions from interviewers, and the explanation of "freelance content creator" is often unconvincing.

The exit cost for an Uber driver is finding another job. The exit cost for an OnlyFans creator is a lifelong digital tattoo.

At entry, the platform promises "freedom": set your own prices, decide your own content, control your own time. At exit, creators find themselves locked in by a series of irreversible choices: content that cannot be deleted, a resume that cannot be explained, and a stigma that cannot be escaped.

A verifiable prediction: By December 31, 2027, the average income per OnlyFans creator will decrease by at least 20% compared to 2023, while the platform's total transaction volume will continue to grow.

The reason is mathematical: in 2023, the number of creators grew by 29%, while transaction volume grew by 19%. More people are flooding in, and each person's share is shrinking. If average income has not dropped by 20% by the end of 2027, this prediction is wrong.

4.6 million people are competing on this platform. The top 0.1% take 76% of the income. The vast majority at the bottom earn less than $200 a month. Creators bear all production costs, marketing costs, legal risks, psychological costs, and social costs; the platform only needs to steadily take its 20% cut.

The extreme form of the gig economy. More extreme than Uber, because the exit cost is lifelong.

05 The Body as a Commodity

On December 1, 2024, Belgium's sex work labor rights bill officially came into effect. Sex workers can now sign labor contracts and enjoy maternity leave, sick leave, health insurance, and pensions—holding the same rights as factory workers, teachers, and programmers. Belgium has become the second country in the world, after New Zealand in 2003, to fully decriminalize sex work and grant labor rights.

The Netherlands has pursued a legalization policy for 24 years. Multiple studies estimate that 60-80% of the window workers in Amsterdam's Red Light District are "not entirely voluntary." This proportion has not decreased in twenty years.

Two data points point to the same difficult question: What changes can the law actually bring?

Window workers in Amsterdam's Red Light District, legal brothels in the Nevada desert, JK cafes in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, and selfie creators on OnlyFans—all these people are exchanging their bodies for money, yet the way the law treats them differs vastly. Some become legal taxpayers, some are branded as criminals, some operate in gray areas, and some are not even recognized as sex workers.

The same behavior, once it crosses a border, undergoes a transformation in identity. A two-hour drive from Brussels to Paris turns the same woman from a "worker entitled to maternity leave" into a "victim in need of rescue." Legal boundaries are sometimes that arbitrary.

"Sex work is work" or "sex work is exploitation"? This debate has haunted the feminist movement for half a century without a definitive conclusion. The difficulty lies not in the complexity of the answer, but in the fact that both sides avoid a core question: When economic pressure eliminates other options, how much weight does "consent" still carry?

Four Prescriptions

Global attitudes toward sex work are generally divided into four models. These four models are not simply parallel options but consecutive stages in the evolution of policy, each being a response to the failure of the previous stage.

When politicians formulate policies, they often care more about "how it looks to voters" than "whether it benefits sex workers." Politics 101: Voters don't see sex workers, but they see news headlines. The criterion for policy is "reducing negative news," not "reducing harm."

Prohibition is the starting point. Most parts of the United States, China, and the Middle East adopt this approach: both buyers and sellers are criminalized. In theory, this should eliminate the sex industry. The actual effect is identical to the Prohibition of alcohol: the sex industry goes underground, and gangs seize the opportunity to grow. The 1920 Prohibition made Al Capone wealthy; the 2024 prohibition of prostitution benefits pimps. History repeats itself, only the characters change.

When an entire industry is deemed illegal, sex workers cannot report crimes (reporting equals turning oneself in), cannot seek medical care (seeking care equals admitting to a crime), and cannot sign contracts (the contract itself is evidence of a crime). A review published in The Lancet in 2014 showed that sex workers in criminalized environments encounter more violence and have lower rates of condom use. The beneficiaries of prohibition are not women, but violent individuals. Perpetrators know their victims dare not call the police.

When prohibition fails (and prohibition always fails), policymakers must choose: admit defeat and open up, or find another way to continue control? Most countries choose the latter, leading to the emergence of the Nordic Model.

First pioneered by Sweden in 1999 and subsequently followed by Norway, Iceland, and France, this model punishes the buyer but not the seller. The logic is to view sex workers as "victims" rather than "criminals," aiming to reduce supply by targeting demand. This reasoning sounds plausible. Economics, however, offers a prediction: if demand is compressed while supply remains constant, prices will fall. A 2010 Swedish government evaluation report claimed that street sex work decreased by 50%. Critics counter that sex work did not decrease but merely shifted indoors and online; statistics only reflect the most visible portions. Sharper criticism argues that punishing clients reduces business, forcing sex workers to accept more dangerous clients, lower prices, and more hidden locations. Safe clients are deterred, while dangerous ones remain undaunted.

When the Nordic Model is circumvented (and the Nordic Model is always circumvented), the next step is Legalization: state intervention and regulation.

Germany in 2002 and the Netherlands in 2000 adopted this approach: incorporating sex work into the formal sector through licensing, designated zones, and health checks. The window brothels of Amsterdam's Red Light District are representative of this model. Tourists take photos in front of the windows, treating it as exotic scenery. In theory, this should provide the most comprehensive protection, but data shows another side: a 2012 study in World Development found that legalization is associated with higher inflows of human trafficking. After legalization in Germany, there were an estimated 400,000 sex workers, but by the end of 2019, only about 40,000 were formally registered; the rest remained in the gray zone. Dutch government reports also admit that 60-80% of sex workers are not entirely voluntary. Legalization creates a "clean" surface that allows politicians to claim the problem is solved, masking the darkness beneath.

When legalization is abused (and legalization is always abused), the final option is Decriminalization: acknowledging that the state cannot completely control the industry and letting it manage itself.

New Zealand in 2003 and Belgium in 2024 adopted this approach: removing all criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work, but without the state directly issuing licenses. Sex workers can organize themselves, negotiate terms, and obtain labor rights. Evaluation reports following the implementation of New Zealand's Prostitution Reform Act showed reduced violence, improved health outcomes, and better relationships with the police. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the World Health Organization all support this model.

The evolutionary path of policy is: from prohibition to selective punishment, then to state regulation, and finally to industry autonomy. Each step is a response to the failure of the previous one. Prohibition leads to underground activity, the Nordic Model exacerbates marginalization, legalization attracts trafficking, and decriminalization struggles to eliminate stigma. Every policy has academic papers supporting it and papers opposing it. The crux is not the quantity of research, but that different people define "success" differently. Reducing visible sex work? Reducing violence? Reducing trafficking? Increasing tax revenue? Each goal points to a different policy.

This evolutionary path is extremely similar to drug policy. After the failure of the War on Drugs, "supply-side crackdown" strategies appeared; when supply could not be eliminated, the focus shifted to "demand reduction" education campaigns; when education proved ineffective, it turned to "harm reduction" models (needle exchanges, safe injection sites); when harm reduction was still not enough, it finally moved toward decriminalization or even legalization (Portugal in 2001, Oregon in 2020). Sex work policy and drug policy follow the same path, just twenty years later.

No single answer is "correct." This is perhaps why politicians prefer to avoid the topic. Discussing sex work policy risks offending people regardless of which side one takes. By not discussing it, they at least don't lose votes. Silence itself is a policy choice, shifting the cost onto others.

The Essence of the Debate

The divide within feminism regarding sex work appears on the surface to be a "conservative vs. liberal" opposition, but it is actually far more complex.

Radical feminists (such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin) believe that sex work is essentially violence against women and an extreme manifestation of the patriarchal commodification of women's bodies. Regardless of whether women "claim" to be voluntary, they are situated within an oppressive structure, and individual "choice" cannot be evaluated in isolation from that structure. Radicals advocate for the abolition of the sex industry and the punishment of buyers.

Sex-positive feminists (such as Gayle Rubin and sex worker rights organizations like SWEAT) believe that sex work can be an expression of female autonomy. If an adult chooses to exchange bodily labor for compensation, it is not fundamentally different from exchanging mental or physical labor for compensation. Stigma and discrimination are the real problems, not sex work itself. Sex-positive advocates call for decriminalization and the protection of rights.

The two sides have argued for fifty years without consensus. This is because the core disagreement is not about whether "sex work is good or bad," but about a deeper question: In a transaction with unequal power, how much validity does "consent" actually have?

This question is not limited to sex work. Similar logic applies to any labor influenced by economic pressure. Does a coal miner "voluntarily" go down into the pit? Does a Foxconn employee "voluntarily" work overtime? Does an Amazon warehouse worker "voluntarily" urinate in a bottle? Does an Uber driver "voluntarily" drive 12 hours a day?

Sex work pushes this question to the extreme because it involves the most intimate parts of the body.

A review published in PLOS Medicine in 2016 showed that among surveyed sex workers, economic necessity was the primary motive. A survey by the Global Network of Sex Work Projects showed that 75% of sex workers experience income instability, and threats of violence are widespread.

When a woman chooses to sell her body because she cannot afford rent, cannot support her children, or cannot repay student loans, does this count as a "voluntary choice"? If it does, then how low is the threshold for the word "voluntary"? If it does not, then almost all work performed due to economic pressure could be defined as "involuntary."

Both radicals and sex-positive advocates avoid the same core. Radicals focus on "whether this system should exist," while sex-positive advocates focus on "how to protect the people within it." Both questions are important, but both bypass the key: Is "consent" under economic coercion valid?

If the answer is "invalid," then most labor contracts under capitalism are worth questioning. If the answer is "valid," then sex work is not fundamentally different from other jobs. Neither side is willing to push this question to its ultimate conclusion, because the final answer would trap their respective positions in a dilemma.

The Blurring of Boundaries

Japan's JK industry demonstrates how gray areas that are "not explicitly prostitution" become a cover for exploitation.

"JK" is an abbreviation for "Joshi Kosei" (high school girl), referring to high school girls wearing school uniforms. The JK industry includes: JK cafes (male customers pay to chat with high school girls), JK walks (male customers pay to walk with high school girls), JK massages (male customers pay for massages from high school girls), and JK photography (male customers pay to take photos of girls in school uniforms).

Each item viewed individually can be argued as "not a sex act." No sexual intercourse occurs. There is no explicit exchange of money for sexual services. It is merely "companionship" and "labor." Lawyers are experts at this kind of deconstruction. Tax planning uses similar logic: breaking one taxable event into ten non-taxable events. The legal techniques of Apple's "Double Irish" tax avoidance structure and the JK industry's "not prostitution" structure are identical: every step is legal, yet the whole points toward the same objective.

The design intent of the entire system is very obvious. The customer base is almost entirely middle-aged men. The attraction is the symbol of the "high school girl"—not just a "young woman," but a "high school student"—this distinction is deliberate. The pricing and service design all imply that more money can buy more "intimacy." In many cases, the JK industry serves as an entry point for sex trafficking: first contacting clients through "legal" services, then providing sexual services privately.

Even more serious: most practitioners are minors. Girls aged 16 or 17, wearing school uniforms, holding signs in the alleys of Akihabara to solicit customers.

Japan's 1999 Act on Punishment of Activities Relating to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography prohibits any exchange of money for sexual acts with minors. The JK industry survives through the "not a sexual act" defense. The U.S. State Department's 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report listed Japan as a Tier 2 country (meaning the "government does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts"), and the 2023 report maintained this rating.

The existence of the JK industry reveals the fragility of legal boundaries. When exploitation is decomposed into a series of seemingly "legal" steps, each step can be defended individually, yet the whole constitutes the commodification of minors.

The problem is not limited to Japan. Any legal framework that attempts to draw a clear line between "prostitution" and "non-prostitution" will produce gray areas. And gray areas often become breeding grounds for exploitation. OnlyFans' "not prostitution," Sugar Dating's "not prostitution," GFE (Girlfriend Experience) services' "not prostitution"—the same logic, the same grayness, the same risks. "Not prostitution" has become a legal term worth tens of billions of dollars.

The Signal of 2024

In March 2024, Belgium became the second country in the world to fully decriminalize sex work (following New Zealand).

Decriminalization means that sex work is no longer a criminal act. Belgium went further: integrating sex work into formal labor law. Sex workers can now sign labor contracts and enjoy maternity leave, sick leave, health insurance, pensions, and all other rights of formal employees.

A paradigm shift.

Previous policy debates revolved around "how to control sex work": prohibition, punishing the buyer, or issuing licenses. Belgium's approach poses a different question: "If sex workers are laborers, what rights should they enjoy?"

Can this model be scaled? The obstacles are immense.

Social stigma does not disappear because of legal changes. Sex workers may have legal rights but will still encounter housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and the breakdown of family relationships. The Dutch experience shows that 20 years after legalization, most sex workers still choose not to register. Because registration means public disclosure of identity, and public disclosure means a social cost.

A deeper question is: Can a labor rights framework solve the deep-seated problems in sex work? Maternity leave and pensions are certainly important, but if most people enter this industry because they have no other choice, are labor rights protecting "workers who choose autonomously" or "vulnerable groups forced into it"?

There is no standard answer to this question. At the very least, Belgium has raised a question that was previously avoided: Is society willing to acknowledge that sex workers enjoy the same rights as other laborers?

To make a falsifiable prediction: Before December 31, 2028, at least two more EU countries will follow Belgium's lead and incorporate sex work into formal labor law. If this has not happened by the end of 2028, this judgment is incorrect.

The windows of Amsterdam, the brothels of Nevada, the JK cafes of Ikebukuro, the new laws of Brussels.

Four locations, four policies, four costs. Prohibition leads to underground activity, the Nordic Model exacerbates marginalization, legalization attracts trafficking, decriminalization struggles to eliminate stigma, and labor rights struggle to solve the dilemma of "forced choice."

"Sex work is work" or "sex work is exploitation"?

Perhaps the question itself is biased. Maybe what is truly worth asking is: When a person chooses to exchange their body for money due to economic pressure, how should society treat them? With punishment? Regulation? Protection? Or by turning a blind eye?

Four policies, four answers. Each has data to support it and data to oppose it. Which one is ultimately chosen depends on what society is willing to acknowledge: whether it is willing to recognize this as labor, or choose to look away.

Regardless of the choice, behind the numbers are specific people. Those 60-80% of "not entirely voluntary" women in the Netherlands will not appear in policy debates. They are standing behind some window right now, waiting for the next customer.

06 Destroying a Person in 5 Minutes

In August 2024, South Korean police arrested a 25-year-old university student who operated a Telegram group with over 220,000 members. The content of the group: using AI to generate "intimate photos" of classmates, teachers, and female students from the same school. The faces were real; the bodies were fake. The victims included minors.

How long does it take to create such a photo? About 5 minutes.

How long does it take to delete that photo? The South Korean police's answer: impossible. The photo has already been downloaded, forwarded, and re-uploaded to countless servers. The internet's memory is longer than a human lifespan.

In the same year, the UK Revenge Porn Helpline received 22,275 reports, a year-on-year increase of 20.9%. The five largest deepfake adult websites garnered 100 million views.

The cost of harm approaches zero. The cost of recovery approaches infinity. This is an asymmetric equation, following the exact same logic as credit card fraud: the perpetrator earns a few cents per transaction, while the victim loses thousands of dollars. Once scaled, the perpetrator gets rich, and the victim goes bankrupt.

The Speed of Harm

In 2018, South Korean police received over 6,000 reports of spycam pornography. The imprisonment rate: 2%.

In 2019, approximately 45% of digital sex crime cases were dropped by prosecutors. In 2020, among those cases that resulted in convictions, about 80% of perpetrators received only suspended sentences or fines.

Connect these numbers: reporting a crime does not mean a case is filed. Filing a case does not mean a prosecution. Prosecution does not mean a conviction. Conviction does not mean imprisonment.

6,000 people reported crimes; 120 people went to prison. Every layer of the funnel is leaking.

What does this funnel structure resemble most? A sales funnel. 100 potential customers enter the top of the funnel, 10 show interest, and 1 eventually makes a purchase. Sales managers call this the "conversion rate." The "conversion rate" of the criminal justice system is 2%. In that system, those filtered out are not uninterested customers, but perpetrators who walk free.

Victims suffer the consequences from the day of the incident. Perpetrators know from the day of the incident that they will likely be fine.

Data from psychological research is equally brutal: the psychological trauma experienced by victims of revenge porn is close to the level of sexual assault survivors.

A person has a photo uploaded without any physical contact, yet the psychological trauma is close to being raped. Why?

Because revenge porn is a form of "public execution." The body is not violated, but autonomy, dignity, and control over one's own image are permanently stripped away, and all under public scrutiny. Medieval pillorying at least had an end point. Digital pillorying does not.

In a 2025 study by Thorn, 1 in 7 victims aged 13-20 turned to self-harm. Among LGBTQ+ youth, this proportion rose to 28%. Common diagnoses include PTSD, anxiety disorders, and depression.

5 minutes to upload, 5 years to recover—if recovery is even possible. Many never recover.

The Limitations of the Law

In 2010, an American named Hunter Moore created IsAnyoneUp.com. The website's design intent was clear: users uploaded intimate photos of ex-partners, accompanied by names, social media links, and sometimes even workplaces. Moore not only accepted user uploads but also hired hackers to break into targets' email accounts to steal intimate photos.

At the time, the United States had no specific legislation targeting "revenge porn." Moore exploited that legal vacuum to build a website that attracted millions of visitors every month. Victims' complaints were ignored. The platform claimed it was merely a "host" and was not responsible for content uploaded by users.

In 2012, the FBI began an investigation. In 2015, Moore pleaded guilty. The charges: aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting unauthorized access to a computer. Note that it was not "distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery," because that crime did not exist at the time.

The sentencing result: 2.5 years in federal prison and a $2,000 fine. He was released in 2017.

$2,000. The lives of thousands of people were destroyed for a total price of $2,000. On average, each victim was worth a few cents.

An interesting comparison: in 2016, a man was sued by record labels for illegally downloading 35 songs and was ordered to pay $675,000 in damages. About $19,000 per song. Hunter Moore destroyed thousands of lives for a few cents each. Pirating a Taylor Swift song is three million times more expensive than destroying an ordinary girl's life.

The scales of justice are never balanced; they tilt toward the side with organized legal resources. Record labels have legal departments. Repercussed ex-girlfriends do not.

Moore's case pushed for legislation across US states. By 2024, most states had laws targeting non-consensual intimate imagery. In May 2025, the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed into law, prohibiting the nationwide distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery, including deepfake content.

South Korea urgently amended its laws after the 2020 Nth Room incident, making the viewing or possession of non-consensual intimate imagery a crime. Japan passed the "Revenge Porn Prevention Act" following the 2013 Mitaka City stalking murder. The UK's Online Safety Act criminalized the sharing or threatening to share deepfake intimate imagery.

The law is progressing. What about enforcement?

Back to the South Korean data: 6,000 reports, 2% imprisonment. The law can exist, while justice remains absent.

The Platform's Choice

Copyright infringement is removed much faster than non-consensual intimate imagery. Research confirms: DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints are usually processed within hours. Non-consensual intimate imagery? The retention time is measured in weeks.

Taylor Swift's record label sends a DMCA notice, and it's deleted in hours. An ordinary girl's revenge porn has to wait for weeks.

Technology is not the bottleneck. Platforms have the ability to quickly delete infringing content, provided that the infringement affects commercial interests.

The underlying logic is a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation. If a pirated song is discovered by Sony, the cost of not deleting it is $150,000 in statutory damages plus legal fees. If a revenge porn photo is discovered by a victim, the cost of not deleting it is... almost zero. A 16-year-old high school girl will not hire a lawyer to fight a two-year lawsuit. The girl's parents might not even know about it.

Platforms are doing ROI calculations; it's just that there is no column for "human dignity" in the Excel spreadsheet.

StopNCII.org provides an effective solution. This organization, operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline, uses "digital fingerprinting" technology: victims upload the hash values of images (rather than the images themselves), and participating platforms automatically detect and delete matching content. The deletion success rate exceeds 90%. As of 2024, over 300,000 non-consensual intimate images have been deleted.

The question is: why does this require a non-profit organization to do? Why don't Meta, Google, and TikTok proactively build similar systems?

The answer is simple: there is no commercial incentive. StopNCII.org has an annual operating budget of a few million dollars. Meta spends over $5 billion annually on content moderation, but that $5 billion is primarily used to delete hate speech and misinformation because that content affects advertisers. Revenge porn won't make Coca-Cola withdraw its ads.

Whoever can threaten a platform's revenue is worth protecting.

Deepfakes

In the first three quarters of 2023, 40 mainstream deepfake adult content websites uploaded 143,733 new videos. This number exceeds the total of all previous years combined.

Monitoring data from Sensity AI: 90-95% of online deepfake videos are non-consensual adult content. About 90% of victims are women.

In March 2024, a Channel 4 News investigation found that nearly 4,000 celebrities were victims of deepfake adult content, 255 of whom were British. Victims included actors, TV presenters, musicians, and YouTube creators, whose faces were transplanted onto adult content without consent. Presenter Cathy Newman was one of the victims herself; Newman described the experience as "a violation."

The five largest deepfake adult content websites received 100 million views in three months.

The barrier to entry for deepfake technology is rapidly lowering. A few years ago, creating a realistic face-swap video required professional equipment and technical knowledge. Now, free mobile apps can do it. Perpetrators no longer need technical skills; they only need malice.

Even more terrifying: deepfakes do not require original intimate material.

A victim may have never taken any intimate photos, yet their face can be transplanted onto any body. "You're safe if you don't take intimate photos"—the advice many parents give their children—has seen its defensive line completely fail. A selfie on Instagram is enough.

Anyone can become a victim. Anyone can become a perpetrator. Technology has leveled the threshold while erasing the sense of security.

In 2024, South Korea was identified by a US cybersecurity firm as the "country most targeted by deepfake adult content." That 220,000-member Telegram group is just the tip of the iceberg. Similar groups are still operating, and new "works" are being produced every day.

For every group that is tracked down, ten new groups pop up elsewhere. For every perpetrator prosecuted, a hundred will never be held accountable. This is a game of whack-a-mole; the hammer is manual, while the moles are mass-produced by machines.

It takes 5 minutes to upload a photo.

6,000 reports in South Korea, 120 people in prison, a 2% "conversion rate." Hunter Moore destroyed the lives of thousands and was sentenced to 2.5 years with a $2,000 fine. The statutory damages for pirating a song are $150,000. Copyright infringement is deleted in hours; dignity infringement is handled slowly. The volume of deepfake adult content videos uploaded in 2023 exceeded the total of all previous years combined.

The law is playing catch-up. Platforms are doing ROI calculations. Technology is accelerating.

A falsifiable prediction: Before December 31, 2027, deepfake porn victims will expand from "celebrities + ordinary people" to "anyone with social media photos." The technical threshold for generating a realistic video will drop to "mobile app + 30 seconds." If that does not happen by the end of 2027 (if a mass-market "one-click face swap" app does not appear), this prediction is wrong.

Most of the 220,000 members of that Telegram group in August 2024 will never be held accountable. Victims deleted their social media accounts, changed their phone numbers, and some moved to different cities.

Those photos (photos that were never actually taken) still exist on some server, in some group, on someone's phone.

Destroying a person in 5 minutes. Impossible to delete for a lifetime.

07 When AI Replaces Actors

In 2024, a Spanish company called The Clueless announced that its AI virtual influencer, Aitana Lopez, earns between 3,000 and 10,000 euros per month. Pink hair, 25 years old, and she has never existed. No agent commissions, no complaints about filming hours, no need for vacations, and certainly no getting drunk at parties and posting on Instagram to cause brand contract terminations. The company admitted the reason for creating Aitana was simple: real-life influencers are "too difficult to work with." To translate: real humans have needs, emotions, and boundaries. AI has none of these three. It is convenient.

In the same year, over 50 free websites began offering AI-generated adult content services. Enter a few keywords, and within 30 seconds, a person who never existed is generated. By this time, the focus had moved beyond "whether AI can generate fictional people"; people began to ask: why can't the same technology replicate real people? The answer is simple: it can, and it is already happening.

The Democratization of Production

Ten years ago, creating a photorealistic digital human required a visual effects team on the level of Industrial Light & Magic, millions of dollars in budget, and large server clusters. Now, all it takes is a credit card and a subscription account. Platforms like SoulGen, DeepSwap, or PromptChan have leveled the technical barriers to the ground.

This shift is called the "democratization of production," which sounds wonderful. In reality, it means anyone can become a "director," and the actor's consent becomes irrelevant. The speed at which technology has trickled down from Hollywood VFX studios to bedroom computers is three orders of magnitude faster than the speed at which regulatory agencies draft documents. Previously, producing a Deepfake video required high-end graphics cards and programming knowledge; now, cloud-based generation services have turned the entire process into a three-step "click-wait-download" idiot-proof operation.

When generation tools become consumer-grade products, customized pornographic content targeting individuals is no longer the exclusive domain of hackers. Former partners, stalkers, or mere internet pranksters now possess powers that previously belonged only to movie studios. Only this time, there are no casting directors, no contracts, and no paychecks.

The Dilution of Value

Economic principles are ruthless. The marginal cost of generating a high-quality AI adult image is only a few cents, while organizing a real-life shoot—including venue, lighting, photographer, and model fees—carries a marginal cost of at least several hundred dollars. There is a cost gap of approximately 4.7 times between the two. As long as the market's thirst for "stimulation" outweighs its obsession with "authenticity," it will inevitably tilt toward low-cost supply.

It follows the exact same logic as manufacturing outsourcing. In the 1990s, American companies found that the hourly wage of Chinese workers was 1/20th that of American workers, so factories relocated. In the 2020s, content producers found that the marginal cost of AI is 1/100th that of real humans, so "actors" are being replaced. Manufacturing outsourcing at least still required real people to work on assembly lines; AI generation eliminates even that step. What is being replaced, besides the labor itself, is the necessity of the laborer's existence.

This tilt is reflected both at the price level and in the erosion of moral baselines. A December 2023 study by the Stanford Internet Observatory pointed out that the LAION-5B dataset, widely used to train open-source models like Stable Diffusion, contained over 3,200 images suspected of being Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), with at least 1,008 images explicitly verified. Research methods included PhotoDNA hash matching, cryptographic hash matching, and machine learning classifiers. LAION subsequently took the dataset offline temporarily for cleaning, which amounted to an admission of the problem's existence.

It demonstrates that the AI-generated content branded as "victimless" is built upon mathematical models derived from the suffering of real victims. Every generation is a reuse of the aforementioned illegal data. The boundary between "fictional" and "real" does not exist because the technology is continuous.

Meanwhile, the distribution of protective resources exhibits an extreme Matthew Effect. A March 2024 investigation by Channel 4 News found that nearly 4,000 celebrities had become victims of deepfake pornography. There were 255 British victims, and the five major deepfake websites received 100 million views within three months. This is a scaled industry, by no means a marginal phenomenon.

In January 2024, deepfake images of Taylor Swift spread on X (formerly Twitter), gaining 47 million views within 17 hours. The platform quickly banned related search terms, and legal teams and PR machines rapidly brought the situation under control. In contrast, in the Telegram deepfake scandal that occurred in Seoul, South Korea, in August 2024, the victims were ordinary high school girls. There were no legal teams, no direct lines to the media, and those images might circulate in chat groups for months or even years. South Korea subsequently passed a bill making the possession or viewing of sexually explicit deepfake images/videos a crime. The state was forced to react rather than take preventive measures in advance.

In the new world, whether a face belongs to oneself depends on whether one has enough capital to assert ownership.

Contract Traps

Even though both rely on their faces and bodies for a living, the situations of Hollywood actors and adult industry performers are worlds apart. This gap stems from organizational structure, not the technology itself.

After ending their strike in 2023, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) won key provisions: if a production company wants to use an actor's "digital replica," they must provide a "clear and conspicuous" informed consent form. More importantly, the agreement stipulates a 48-hour notice period, and authorization must be project-based, prohibiting one-time permanent authorization. The consent form must include a "reasonably specific description of the intended use."

California subsequently signed bill AB 2602 on September 17, 2024, explicitly nullifying broad clauses common in contracts such as "all media known or hereafter devised." Bill AB 1836 protects deceased actors, requiring the consent of the estate or family to use digital replicas.

This set of legal armor is entirely non-existent in the adult industry.

Performers in the adult industry are typically defined as "independent contractors," with no unions and no collective bargaining power. Faced with contracts unilaterally drafted by platforms or production companies, they have only two choices: sign or leave. Contracts often bury clauses allowing companies to "exploit the material in any manner." In the AI era, this means a video filmed by a practitioner in 2020 could be used in 2025 to train an AI model and then generate VR scenes they never participated in.

Legislators are trying to catch up with technology. Although California's AB 2602 and AB 1836 have been signed, they do not take effect until January 1, 2025. This four-month window is as long as a century for AI technology that iterates on a "monthly" basis. Even more awkward is that California's laws struggle to regulate content filmed in Las Vegas, hosted on servers in Montreal, and distributed through shell companies in Cyprus. Laws have borders; data flows do not.

This legislative lag is no accident. The iteration cycle for AI generation capabilities is about six months, while the legislative cycle is measured in "years." The law is always playing catch-up, and by the time it does, the technology has moved to the next generation. In August 2024, the San Francisco City Attorney sued 16 "deepfake nude" websites that received 200 million visits in the first half of 2024. The lawsuit is the correct reaction, but the timing exposes the problem: 200 million visits had already occurred.

SAG-AFTRA members get a 48-hour notice period and project-based authorization. What do adult industry performers get? A 20-page contract in 8-point font, with an agent saying, "That's a standard contract; everyone signs it."

AI Companions

Deepfake videos steal the performer's face, while AI companions take over emotional labor.

In 2024, the AI companion market reached $2.7 billion and is expected to grow to $24.5 billion by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate of 24.7%. Data from Character AI shows that active users engage in an average of 25 sessions per day, with single-session durations as high as 1.5 to 2.7 hours. Users are not merely using a tool; they are essentially maintaining a relationship. Users no longer need a real person to chat via webcam; what they need is a digital presence that is always online, replies in seconds, is entirely submissive, and remembers every preference.

A counter-intuitive statistic: the gender ratio of Character AI users is nearly 50:50, with male and female users almost equal. It breaks the stereotype that "AI companion services are for lonely men." Female users are also using AI companion apps, seeking simulated intimacy just the same.

The depth of this dependency was laid bare during an incident in early 2023. When the AI companion app Replika suddenly disabled its Erotic Roleplay (ERP) feature, panic erupted in the user community. Reddit moderators had to pin mental health resources and suicide hotlines. Users described feeling "heartbroken," "abandoned," and as if they had "lost their best friend."

Over a chatbot.

When emotional projection is deep enough, a code adjustment becomes a "breakup." For creators in the adult industry who provide a "Girlfriend Experience" (GFE) through platforms like OnlyFans, this triggers a true existential crisis. AI doesn't need to sleep, doesn't have mood swings, and can engage in deep emotional communication with ten thousand users simultaneously. It represents the ultimate outsourcing of emotional labor, and real humans are destined to be unable to compete with algorithms on a scale.

The Replika crisis exposed a deeper issue: users' emotional dependence on AI is by no means a metaphor; it has become a real psychological phenomenon. Functional adjustments equal a "breakup," requiring crisis intervention. The problem has jumped beyond the technical level, pointing directly to how vulnerabilities in the human emotional system are being commercially exploited.

Prediction

By December 31, 2027, AI-generated adult content will account for more than 30% of new adult content globally.

This judgment stems from cold cost accounting and has nothing to do with technological optimism. When the cost of generating content is only 20% of a real shoot, with lower risks and more controllable compliance, capital will choose algorithms without hesitation. If the proportion is lower than 30% by then, the only reason will be that the growth of hardware computing power has hit a physical bottleneck, certainly not because the market has found its conscience.

Both are performers, yet one side has unions, 48-hour notices, project-based authorizations, and laws nullifying broad clauses. The other side consists of independent contractors with no unions, no collective bargaining, and contracts unilaterally drafted by companies—sign or leave.

When AI can infinitely replicate human faces, those with unions have avenues for recourse, while those without unions can only watch their faces appear in scenes they never filmed. The gap in protection stems from organizational capacity, unrelated to ideology. And organizational capacity, in the adult industry, has never belonged to the performers.

The Regulatory Arms Race

On January 1, 2024, Montana's age verification law went into effect.

On the same day, VPN demand in the state surged by 482%.

When North Carolina's law took effect on the same day, VPN demand grew by 266%.

After the UK fully implemented age verification in July 2025, VPN usage increased from 750,000 users to over 1.5 million.

Behind these numbers lies an irony: every "child protection" bill makes the financial reports of VPN companies shine brighter. NordVPN and ExpressVPN don't even need to lobby lawmakers, because lawmakers are already promoting these companies for free.

VPN sales have become an inverse indicator of regulatory effectiveness. The higher the sales, the more a ban resembles a piece of performance art.

Prohibition: A Replay of Medical History

China's Great Firewall blocks approximately 311,000 domains, with pornographic content being one of the primary categories for blocking. From a technical perspective, this system is the most complex internet censorship mechanism in human history, combining DNS poisoning, IP blocking, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), keyword filtering, and machine learning identification. If censorship is an engineering discipline, China is undoubtedly the MIT of this field.

How effective is it?

"Climbing the wall" (bypassing the firewall) has become a widespread phenomenon. If bans were truly effective, there would be no need to ban the tools used to bypass them. The ban does not eliminate demand; it merely raises the cost of access from zero to $10 a month plus a small probability of being caught.

This structure has a perfect analogy in medical history: the arms race between antibiotics and bacteria.

When penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, the medical community thought the problem of infection was solved forever. The result: bacteria evolved resistance, the medical community developed new antibiotics, and bacteria evolved again. Eighty years later, superbugs have become a major threat to global public health. Every "solution" has selected for a stronger opponent.

Internet blocking follows a similar logic. Every technical upgrade selects for smarter bypassers. Those most easily deterred by a block are ordinary users—people who didn't care much to begin with. Those who remain are the truly motivated, who learn more complex tools and find more hidden channels. Blocking does not eliminate demand; it performs reverse natural selection: weeding out the weak and strengthening the strong.

The case of India is even more direct. In 2015, the government blocked 857 pornographic websites on the grounds of "protecting women and children." A few weeks later, the ban was partially lifted. The reason was not a change in the government's stance, but rather complaints from telecommunications companies about lost revenue: pornographic traffic accounted for a significant proportion of network bandwidth, and the block left that bandwidth idle.

Moral positions eventually gave way to quarterly earnings reports. This is perhaps the most honest way to evaluate policy.

Censorship: The Art of Creating a Premium

The Japanese model is different. Adult content is legal in Japan, with a massive industry and a complete supply chain. The only requirement: mosaics.

Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code prohibits the distribution of "obscene" material. The 1957 Chatterley case established a curious boundary: direct display of genitals is obscene, while covering them is not. Consequently, Japan developed the world's most unique adult content industry: massive output, complex categorization, and the requirement that all videos must have mosaics over key areas.

Video production ethics review bodies are responsible for frame-by-frame inspections to ensure every work meets the obscuration standards. One specialized industry censors the pixels of another industry. This phenomenon has been described as "Schrödinger's pornography": if it's covered, it's not obscene; if it's exposed, it's a crime. A 12x12 blur of squares has become the entire boundary between law and industry.

How effective is it? Japan's mosaic laws have spawned a massive "uncensored" underground market. Uncensored content produced overseas flows into Japan, and consumers are willing to pay a premium of 3 to 5 times the price for "uncensored" material.

This reflects an iron law of economics: when legal supply is artificially restricted, the black market fills the demand. The restriction itself creates arbitrage opportunities.

Even more subtle are the secondary effects. Mosaic requirements prompted Japanese producers to develop an "export strategy": domestic release of the mosaic version and overseas release of the uncensored version. The same work, two versions, two sets of pricing. Without the mosaic law, the premium category of "uncensored" would not exist.

Regulations attempt to make pornography "look less pornographic." The result, however, is that the porn industry becomes larger and more profitable because consumers are willing to pay a higher price for "forbidden reality." The pricing logic for Louis Vuitton limited editions and uncensored adult videos is exactly the same: scarcity creates value.

Autonomy: A Vanishing Experiment

At the federal level in the United States, adult content is legal. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, and regulation relies primarily on industry self-discipline. This model persisted for decades, making the U.S. the global center of the adult content industry.

The change came in 2024.

Multiple states began implementing age verification laws, requiring the uploading of ID cards or facial recognition. Texas, Utah, Montana—the list continues to grow.

Pornhub's reaction is worth noting: it directly blocked services in these states rather than implementing verification. On the surface, this is a political gesture of "protesting legislation," but in reality, it is a business calculation: the cost of implementing age verification (technical development, legal compliance, user churn, data liability) combined exceeds the profit of operating in that state. Exiting is more cost-effective than compliance.

What about the users? The cost of purchasing a VPN is lower than the cost of giving up a habit. For $10 a month, the problem is solved.

A game theory phenomenon can be observed here. Pornhub's exit from a state is actually a way of filtering user value. Users willing to pay for a VPN will continue to visit; those unwilling to pay will churn. What Pornhub loses are price-sensitive users—the ones with the lowest profit margins. What remains are core users willing to pay a higher price.

The ban has become a free user segmentation tool. Pornhub didn't even have to do it itself; the government did the work for them.

Age Verification: The Price Tag of Privacy

The UK's Online Safety Act is the latest large-scale experiment in age verification.

Fully effective on July 25, 2025, all adult content websites must implement "highly effective" age verification, including facial age estimation, digital identity wallets, and government ID. The penalty for non-compliance is a fine of 10% of global revenue.

Five days after the law took effect, an additional 5 million age checks were performed daily. It sounds like a success.

Another data point from the same period: VPN usage grew from 750,000 to 1.5 million, a twofold increase.

Do the math: 1.4 million Britons chose to pay for a VPN (approximately £50-£100 per year) rather than complete age verification for free. For these 1.4 million people, the value of privacy exceeds £50 per year. This is a real-world price discovery: how much is privacy worth? At least £50 a year.

What is the underlying reason? Adults do not want any database to know what they are watching. Although age verification systems claim they will not store browsing data, users still do not trust them. Given the data breaches of the past decade, this distrust is rational.

A reasonable speculation is that age verification records from 2025 could become blackmail material in 2030. "It is known which websites a certain person visited on July 26, 2025. Pay £1,000, or this list will be sent to your employer." Data leakage is not a question of "if," but "when."

Age verification creates a paradox: laws intended to protect minors instead drive the popularization of anonymity tools. And these anonymity tools can just as easily be used by minors. In fact, digital natives are better at using VPNs than their parents.

The law protects those who do not need protection (law-abiding adults) but is useless against those who truly need it (tech-savvy teenagers). The target group and the actually affected group are almost completely misaligned.

The Scoreboard

Four models, four costs. But they are not parallel options; they are a path of policy evolution.

Prohibition is the starting point. When prohibition fails (and prohibition always fails), policymakers face a choice: admit failure and deregulate, or find another way to continue control. Most choose the latter. Thus, censorship emerges—not banning existence, but restricting certain forms. When censorship is bypassed (and censorship is always bypassed), the next step is autonomy, letting the industry manage itself. When autonomy is abused (and autonomy is always abused), the last resort is age verification—ignoring the content and only controlling who can see it.

Each model is a response to the failure of the previous one. Prohibition leads to reverse natural selection, filtering for harder-to-deal-with bypassers. Censorship creates premium categories, making underground markets more profitable. The disappearance of autonomy leaves behind the byproduct of user segmentation. Age verification drives anonymization, protecting the wrong people.

The direction of policy evolution is: from managing content to managing channels to managing users. Every step is a retreat from the failure of the previous step.

To make a falsifiable prediction: by December 31, 2028, the global VPN market size will grow by at least 30% due to adult content regulation. If VPN market growth is less than 30% by the end of 2028 (excluding the growth in corporate VPN usage), this prediction is wrong.

There is an irony here: a symbiotic relationship has formed between regulators and VPN founders. The former need the political capital of "doing something," while the latter need the market demand for "evading something." Every new age verification law is a free advertisement for VPN companies. Policymakers claim to have "protected the children" in campaign ads, while VPN companies report "30% growth" in financial statements. Both sides benefit. Only the abstract "protected child" continues to skillfully use a VPN more advanced than their parents'.

Which model is best? That depends on the definition of "best." If the goal is to reduce adult content consumption, the data does not support any model achieving this. If the goal is to protect minors, every model has obvious loopholes. If the goal is political feasibility, every model is adopted somewhere because politicians need to look like they are doing something, rather than actually accomplishing something.

Montana 482%, North Carolina 266%, UK doubling. VPN sales are the most honest scoreboard in this game of catch-up.

Antibiotics select for superbugs; bans select for super-bypassers. The pricing logic for Louis Vuitton and uncensored content is identical. Bans complete user segmentation for Pornhub. The real winners of age verification are VPN companies.

Regulators are falling behind, and the gap is widening every year. Every new law is a free advertisement for VPN companies.

09 36 Million Reports

In 2023, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 36.2 million reports.

An average of 99,178 per day. 4,132 per hour. 69 per minute. In the time it took to read this sentence, another report was submitted.

Behind every report is an image, a video, a child. 36.2 million is not a statistical figure. It is 36.2 million cases.

Is it progress or a disaster? The answer depends on whether you ask "how many were found" or "how many actually exist."

The Fog of Numbers

In 2024, the number of NCMEC reports dropped to 20.5 million.

The reason for the decline is not that the problem has diminished.

Meta changed its report bundling method. Previously, multiple images uploaded by the same user were reported separately; now, they are merged into a single report. NCMEC's adjusted estimate is 29.2 million, which is still lower than 2023 and not as optimistic as the numbers appear.

Meanwhile, reports of online enticement grew by 192% year-on-year. Cases of adults luring children online to send explicit images nearly tripled.

Numbers drop, the problem worsens. Changes in statistical methodology can make a disaster look like progress. This is the oldest trick in statistics: change the way you count, change the story.

Since establishing the CyberTipline in 1998, NCMEC has received a cumulative total of over 190 million reports. 190 million. This is a record of a quarter-century. Tech companies, law enforcement agencies, and non-profits have invested billions of dollars in developing detection tools, training moderators, and lobbying for legislation.

The result?

In 2014, NCMEC received 1 million reports. In 2023, 36.2 million. A 36-fold increase in ten years.

If this is "success," success needs a new definition. If a hospital's surgical mortality rate increased 36-fold in ten years, no one would call it "medical progress."

The Lie of "Selfies"

The UK's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported 2024 as "the worst year on record."

Since 2014, child sexual abuse material has increased by 830%.

In the IWF's categorized data, there is a category called "self-generated" (selfie). In 2024, 91% of confirmed child sexual abuse material fell into this category.

"Selfie." What does this word imply?

Initiative. Voluntariness. The child took it themselves. The responsibility lies with the child.

The truth is: the vast majority of "self-generated" material is filmed by children who have been lured, coerced, or deceived by adults online. A 12-year-old does not proactively take explicit photos to share with strangers. These children have been groomed; adults spend weeks or even months building false trust, then manipulate, threaten, and blackmail them.

The terminology itself inflicts secondary harm. "Selfie" redefines the victim as a participant and the crime as "the child's choice."

This is like calling a robbery victim a "voluntary donor."

When 91% of cases are labeled as "selfies," the public perception of the severity of the problem is distorted. Parents blame children for being "careless." Policymakers focus on "educating children about online safety" rather than tracking and punishing perpetrators. The shift of responsibility, from perpetrator to victim, is completed through language.

Language is not neutral. Language is power. Whoever names the problem defines the problem. Whether it is called a "selfie" or "coerced filming" determines where policy resources flow.

AI Acceleration

In 2023, NCMEC received 4,700 reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

In 2024, this number became 67,000.

Growth rate: 1,325%.

IWF data is even more disturbing. In 2024, the IWF began tracking AI-generated child sexual abuse videos. Throughout 2024, 13 were detected. In 2025, this number became 3,440.

An increase of 26,362%. Two hundred and sixty-three times.

These numbers require a moment to digest. Not 26%, not 260%, but 26,000%. What does that mean? If income grew at this rate, you would be a billionaire next year. If a virus spread at this rate, it would be declared a global pandemic.

AI-generated child sexual abuse material exists in a legal gray area: there is no "real" victim.

The illegality of traditional child sexual abuse material is built on a premise: the production process itself is harmful to children. Filming, distribution, and possession—every step continues the exploitation of a real child.

AI-generated images do not require real children. Stable Diffusion can generate an explicit image of a non-existent child in 30 seconds. Midjourney can turn anyone into a "content creator."

Some defenders claim: this is "harmless fantasy." No real children are harmed.

There are two problems with this argument. Each is enough to turn the word "harmless" into a joke.

First, where does the training data for AI models come from? Generative AI models used real child sexual abuse material during the training process, a fact supported by research evidence. In December 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a study finding that the LAION-5B dataset (an open-source dataset widely used to train image generation models) contained 3,226 instances of suspected child sexual abuse images, about one-third of which were confirmed by third-party verification. The foundation of "harmless AI-generated content" is the suffering of real victims. The models are trained on real crimes.

Second, AI-generated content can be used to create more real victims. Deepfake technology can transplant any child's face onto explicit images. These images can be used to blackmail, humiliate, and coerce real children. The phrase "no real victim" becomes meaningless when an image is used to threaten a 12-year-old girl to "comply or these photos will be sent to your classmates." "Fantasy" becomes a weapon.

The law is catching up, but too slowly. The UK's 2024 Online Safety Act explicitly criminalizes AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The US is still pushing legislation at the state level, with no unified federal standard. Most countries have not even begun to discuss the issue.

AI generation speed is measured in seconds. Legislative speed is measured in years. From the start, the outcome of this race was written.

The Boundaries of Detection

Approximately 230 tech companies worldwide use PhotoDNA technology developed by NCMEC to detect child sexual abuse material.

PhotoDNA works through hash matching. This technology converts known child sexual abuse images into unique digital fingerprints; when a user uploads an image matching those fingerprints, the system automatically flags and reports it.

Meta is the largest source of reports. In 2023, Facebook and Instagram contributed the vast majority of NCMEC reports. Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and Snapchat also use similar technology.

This sounds like a success story. Tech companies are responsibly detecting and reporting illegal content. That is the narrative in press releases.

The problem is: PhotoDNA can only detect known, already-flagged images.

Newly generated content, whether traditionally filmed or AI-generated, can pass through detection systems unimpeded. Only after the relevant content is discovered by human moderators, flagged, and added to the database will it be automatically detected.

Until then, this content can be shared thousands of times. Every share is secondary harm.

This is similar to the dilemma of antivirus software: it can only detect known virus signatures. New viruses can spread freely until someone discovers, analyzes, and updates the database. The difference is: computer viruses destroy machines; here, they destroy children.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have the capability to scan new content. These companies' AI technology can identify child sexual abuse material that has never been seen before.

These companies choose not to do so.

The official reason is privacy. The real reason is legal risk and commercial logic.

In 2021, Apple announced it would scan for child sexual abuse material in iCloud. Privacy advocates immediately pushed back, fearing the technology would be abused by governments. Apple postponed the plan indefinitely a few months later.

What is the lesson? Doing the right thing brings a PR disaster. Not doing the right thing carries no cost, because no one will sue Apple for "failing to stop child sexual abuse."

Doing it leads to being sued. Not doing it does not. The choice is obvious.

This is a classic dilemma of corporate governance: when moral action conflicts with legal risk, the legal department always wins. The job of Apple's legal team is to protect Apple, not to protect children. And they do that job very well.

The result is: detection systems are very effective for old content but almost powerless against new content. Old victims receive some degree of protection. New victims are on their own.

Ironically, AI is accelerating on both sides. AI used for detection can identify never-before-seen illegal content. AI used for generation can create new illegal content every second.

The speed of generation is measured in seconds. The will to detect is measured in years. The capability has always been there. The choice is not.

36.2 million reports. 190 million cumulative records. 67,000 reports of AI-generated content, a 1,325% annual increase. 91% of "selfies" are actually coerced children. 230 companies detect known hashes, while new content passes through unimpeded.

Behind every number is a child. 36.2 million reports means 36.2 million times someone discovered an image or a video and decided to click "report." This is the visible part.

How large is the invisible part?

A disturbing comparison: In 2023, Meta reported 30.6 million pieces of suspicious content, accounting for 84.5% of NCMEC's total reports. What about Apple? 267 reports. Not 267 million, but 267.

Apple's device market share is far higher than 0.0007%. This number does not indicate that "that content does not exist on Apple devices," but rather that "Apple chooses not to look for it."

Here is a falsifiable prediction: Before December 31, 2027, at least one major tech company will face a class-action lawsuit or regulatory investigation for "intentionally failing to detect" child sexual abuse material. If no such legal action occurs by the end of 2027, this prediction is wrong.

The only certainty is: the numbers grow every year. Detection is improving, but generation is also accelerating. Children are caught in the middle. No one chose to enter this race.

36 million. Next year it might be 40 million. The year after, 50 million.

Tech company press releases will continue to announce a "commitment to child safety." Shareholders will continue to receive dividends. Legal teams will continue to fulfill their duties.

Children will continue to be externalities.

The Non-Existent Diagnosis

In November 2023, Google Trends data showed: searches for "porn addiction help" increased by 47% compared to 2019, hitting an all-time high.

In the same month, the top ten best-selling self-help books in Amazon's "porn addiction" category were all new titles published after 2020. The NoFap subreddit's subscriber count surpassed 1 million in October 2022. Enrollment in evangelical churches' "purity ministry" programs reached record levels.

The term "porn addiction" implies a disease, a pathological state requiring treatment. It suggests a need for 12-step recovery programs, group therapy, prayer, and a "sponsor" to answer the phone when the urge to relapse strikes.

The question is: does this diagnosis exist?

Open the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), the authoritative guide of the American Psychiatric Association. Search for "pornography addiction." Result: non-existent.

The only behavioral addiction recognized by the DSM-5 is pathological gambling. It does not include pornography, sexual behavior, or any compulsive behaviors related to sex.

The committee discussed it and voted it down.

Not an Addiction

The World Health Organization's position is slightly different.

The 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which took effect on January 1, 2022, included a new diagnosis: Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD), code 6C72.

This sounds like an acknowledgment of the existence of "sex addiction."

Read the definition carefully. ICD-11 classifies CSBD as an impulse control disorder, not an addiction. Article 6C72 of the document explicitly states: CSBD is not an addiction.

This distinction is meaningful. Addiction refers to neurobiological dependence, similar to alcohol or heroin, requiring increasingly larger doses to achieve the same effect, with physiological withdrawal symptoms upon cessation. Impulse control disorder refers to the inability to control impulses, similar to kleptomania or pyromania—knowing one shouldn't do it but being unable to stop.

Both can lead to distress and functional impairment. However, the mechanisms are different, the treatments are different, and the moral implications are different.

The word "addiction" carries a specific narrative: victimhood, a hijacked brain, the need for abstinence and recovery. The narrative of "impulse control disorder" is different: having difficult-to-control impulses that require learning management. The former suggests being "controlled by a disease," while the latter indicates a "need to learn self-control." Responsibility attribution differs. Treatment paths differ. Insurance reimbursement categories differ.

The DSM-5 does not recognize this diagnosis at all. The ICD-11 recognizes the diagnosis but characterizes it as an impulse control disorder, explicitly excluding the addiction classification.

"Porn addiction" in popular culture is almost nowhere to be found in clinical consensus. This does not mean no one suffers from pornography consumption. It suggests that the "addiction" framework might be wrong. Understanding a problem with the wrong framework usually leads to the wrong solutions.

The Boundaries of Moral Distress

The ICD-11 definition of CSBD has a key exclusion clause.

"Distress that is entirely related to moral judgments and religious disapproval... is not sufficient to meet the requirements for the diagnosis of CSBD."

This exclusion clause is worth reading carefully.

Suppose a person watches pornography once a week for several years. They haven't lost their job, haven't ruined their marriage, haven't given up other activities, and don't have an increasingly frequent pattern of use. This person feels deep shame, guilt, and self-loathing. They believe they are "addicted." They join addiction recovery forums, participate in church "purity" programs, and pray for God's help to quit.

According to ICD-11 standards, this person does not meet the diagnosis for CSBD. The distress is real, but the cause lies in moral conflict, unrelated to functional impairment. It is not an inability to control impulses, but simply watching pornography once a week and feeling guilty about it.

Feeling addicted is not the same as clinical addiction. This is a key distinction many are unwilling to accept.

A study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2015 found a positive correlation between the level of religious devotion and self-reported "porn addiction." The more devout the faith, the more likely one is to believe they are "addicted." This may stem from a stronger negative self-evaluation of the same level of consumption, unrelated to whether devout individuals watch more pornography. Same behavior, different labels.

To put it another way: if an atheist and an evangelical Christian watch the same amount of pornography per week, the latter is more likely to consider themselves "addicted." The difference moves away from the behavior itself and rests on the framework. It's like both drinking two glasses of red wine; a Mormon thinks they are an alcoholic, while a Frenchman thinks they are enjoying dinner.

The boundary of diagnosis becomes blurred here. When a person's distress comes from "I shouldn't be doing this" rather than "I can't stop doing this," is it a moral issue or a medical issue?

The ICD-11's answer is: it belongs to moral issues and is unrelated to diagnosis. Medical manuals refuse to label moral conflict as a disease.

The Scientific Vacuum of the Abstinence Movement

The NoFap movement was born on Reddit in June 2011. The name comes from the internet slang "fap" (an onomatopoeia for masturbation). The founder, Alexander Rhodes, was 21 at the time, an ordinary college student in Pittsburgh.

The movement's core claim is that abstaining from masturbation and pornography can bring a range of benefits: increased testosterone, improved energy, better focus, enhanced social skills, and restored sexual function. The forums are full of success stories from the "90-day challenge," with users sharing their "superpower" experiences after abstaining. Some claim that after 30 days of abstinence, "women started noticing." Some claim that after 90 days, "interviews became much easier." Some claim improved sperm quality, thicker hair, and more penetrating eyes.

Is there a scientific basis for these claims?

In July 2024, a committee of the International Society for Sexual Medicine published a review article in Sexual Medicine Reviews, explicitly opposing abstinence-based treatments, whether for pornography or masturbation.

The position of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) is even more direct: there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of "sex addiction" or "porn addiction." If the diagnosis itself does not exist, treatments based on that diagnosis lack a foundation. It's like selling medicine for "Mars Fever"—if the disease doesn't exist, how can the medicine be effective?

The consensus among urologists and mental health experts is that there is insufficient evidence to support the benefits of abstaining from masturbation. A 2003 Chinese study found that testosterone levels rose by about 45% after 7 days of abstinence; this data is repeatedly cited by the NoFap community. Subsequent studies have been unable to replicate this result. Even if a short-term rise is real, there is no evidence that this rise brings the benefits claimed by NoFap. "Superpowers" are more likely a placebo effect combined with a sense of community belonging.

The problem with the NoFap movement is not just a lack of evidence. Critics point out that the movement relies on pseudoscience, may shame normal sexual behavior, and in some branches, fosters misogynistic discourse. Reddit's r/NoFap forum has been warned multiple times for misogynistic comments.

The movement might help a small number of people with truly problematic sexual behaviors. Widespread dissemination may harm more normal people, turning healthy self-exploration into a source of shame and harmless consumption into a source of guilt.

This is reverse iatrogenic harm: the harm does not stem from the treatment, but precisely from the "diagnosis" itself. Labeling normal behavior as pathological and then selling "cure solutions." Some people make money from this process—addiction recovery courses, books, counseling services. Some gain a sense of community belonging. Some gain a sense of moral superiority. The only ones who may be harmed are those who originally had no problem but were persuaded to believe they did.

When science does not support a claim, adhering to that claim usually requires faith. NoFap is more of a faith movement, detached from the realm of scientific intervention. This does not mean participants do not have real experiences. The placebo effect is real. The sense of community belonging is real. It's just that the causal relationship has been misunderstood.

75% of Adolescents

All the above discussions are about adults.

Adults choose whether or not to watch pornography, feel addicted or not, join NoFap or mock NoFap. These are all areas of personal choice.

One data point changes the nature of the discussion.

A 2023 Common Sense Media survey: 75% of adolescents have been exposed to pornography before the age of 17, with more than half of males and nearly one-third of females exposed before the age of 13. Average age of first exposure: 12.

Exposure is unrelated to choice. A 9-year-old child does not "choose to consume adult content"; they simply click a link by accident, see a picture on a classmate's phone, or type a curious question into a search engine. No one ever asked those children if they wanted to see it.

Ages 9 to 13 are a critical period for neurodevelopment. The prefrontal cortex (the brain region responsible for impulse control, decision-making, and long-term planning) does not fully mature until around age 25. During this stage, brain plasticity is extremely high, and early experiences can shape long-term neural pathways.

By analogy: if more than half of 9-year-old children had accidentally drunk hard liquor, it would be seen as a public health crisis. If more than half of 13-year-old boys have seen pornography, it is only seen as a "reality of the internet age." Why? Perhaps because the former has clear legal boundaries, while the latter's boundaries are blurred. Perhaps because the former has measurable physiological harm, while the latter's harm is difficult to quantify. Perhaps because discussing the former is not embarrassing, while discussing the latter is very embarrassing.

Neuroscience research has found that early exposure to pornography may affect long-term brain development, establishing specific sexual arousal patterns and scripts. Multiple studies indicate that frequent exposure to pornography during adolescence is correlated with intimacy difficulties in adulthood, sexual dysfunction, and unrealistic expectations of sex. A 2019 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that adolescents who frequently watch pornography are more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior in intimate relationships.

The focus of the problem has shifted. While the debate is about whether adults are "addicted," the real problem is what signals the developing brain receives during critical periods.

While debating whether adults are "addicted," most 13-year-old boys have already seen pornography. This is like debating what color the lifeboats should be on a sinking ship.

Make a falsifiable prediction: Before December 31, 2027, at least one major developed country will list "exposure to pornography for children under 12" as a public health issue, similar to the policy frameworks for smoking or obesity. If this prediction does not occur by the end of 2027, the judgment is wrong.

Where should the policy focus be? The answer is already clear.

"Porn addiction" is a high-frequency term in self-help books but cannot be found in the DSM-5. ICD-11 recognizes CSBD, classifies it as an impulse control disorder, and explicitly states it is not an addiction.

If distress comes from "I shouldn't watch" rather than "I can't stop," then it may be detached from pathology and belong to moral conflict. ICD-11 agrees with this distinction. When an evangelical Christian and an atheist watch the same content, only the former considers themselves "addicted." Same two glasses of wine: the Mormon is an alcoholic, the Frenchman is a gourmet.

NoFap claims abstinence brings superpowers. July 2024 International Society for Sexual Medicine: no evidence. AASECT: the diagnosis of sex addiction itself lacks evidence. "Superpowers" are more like a placebo plus community belonging. Reverse iatrogenic harm: the diagnosis itself is causing harm.

While debating adult "addiction," more than half of males and nearly one-third of females have already been exposed to pornography before the age of 13. Average age of first exposure: 12.

The real problem has shifted from who is watching to who shouldn't be watching but already has. The telescope of policy is pointed in the wrong direction.

11 The Future of Desire

On February 2, 2024, the Apple Vision Pro was launched in the United States, priced at $3,499. In Apple's promotional videos, business professionals used the device to handle emails, watch movies, and video call their families. Tim Cook called it a "revolution in spatial computing" at the launch event.

However, just two weeks after the launch, reports from VRPorn.com showed that traffic from Apple devices had surged by 400%.

Although Apple's official App Store bans adult content, the Safari browser is not restricted. For a device costing $3,499, one of its first "killer apps" turned out to be adult content. This scene is a carbon copy of the 1980s: Sony tried to maintain a "high-end image" for Betamax, but consumers used it to watch pornography. The embarrassment of Tim Cook and the embarrassment of Akio Morita are separated by forty years, yet the plot remains identical.

Silicon Valley is keen on discussing "killer apps," but few are willing to admit that for almost every new consumer electronic technology, adult content is one of the earliest validated killer applications. From VHS to the internet, from smartphones to VR, history repeats itself, and every generation of technology leaders pretends that this time will be different.

Desire is the most honest early adopter. It doesn't look at financial statements or care about brand image; it only asks one question: Is the experience engaging enough?

The $19 Billion Silence

In 2021, the global VR adult content market was valued at approximately $716 million. Juniper Research predicts that by 2026, this figure will reach $19 billion, a growth of more than 25 times in five years. Its growth rate exceeds that of cryptocurrency and the valuation inflation of AI startups. The difference is that funding news in this field never appears on TechCrunch.

Meta has invested over $50 billion cumulatively in the VR field. Mark Zuckerberg talks about the "long-term vision of the metaverse" and the "future of spatial work" in earnings calls, but never mentions adult content. This avoidance is like a real estate developer never mentioning "nightlife amenities" in a prospectus, even though everyone understands that bar streets are the invisible pillars of commercial real estate valuations.

The VR adult industry is actually an invisible beneficiary of Meta's metaverse strategy. Meta is responsible for hardware subsidies and ecosystem building, while the adult industry hitches a ride. Zuckerberg pays for the content ecosystem, and adult websites reap the users. The beneficiary is never publicly acknowledged, and the party paying the bill pretends to look the other way.

Another prediction from Juniper shows that by 2026, 97% of VR adult content revenue will come from subscription models. In other words, the user relationship has shifted from a "single transaction" to "long-term companionship."

An analogy can be made with gym memberships: the business essence of a gym is not providing fitness services, but selling the psychological suggestion of "becoming healthier." Most members go only a few times a year but still renew their memberships because canceling the subscription is equivalent to giving up the fantasy of a "better self." VR adult subscriptions may operate on a similar psychological mechanism: what users buy is not just access to content, but a sense of security in "having companionship at any time." Canceling the subscription means admitting the return of loneliness.

Gyms sell the illusion of a "better self," while adult subscriptions sell the illusion of "escaping loneliness." The business logic of both is consistent: renewal rates are higher than actual usage rates.

Legislators Without Votes

In July 2025, the Australian anti-pornography organization Collective Shout sent an open letter to Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, demanding they stop providing payment services to platforms containing adult content.

A few days later, Steam removed hundreds of games, and Itch.io hid over 20,000 NSFW games from search and browsing pages. Valve's statement was just one sentence: "Losing payment methods will make it impossible for customers to purchase other games on Steam."

There were no hearings, no legislative procedures, and no channels for appeal. One letter, a few days, and hundreds of products were forced off the shelves.

By contrast, how long does it take for the US Congress to pass a bill? The EARN IT Act was first proposed in 2020 and was still stuck in committee in 2024. Discussions on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have lasted a decade without a single line of code being changed. The legislative machine moves at a geological pace, while Visa's compliance department acts at the speed of a business cycle.

This is a privatization of power. Traditionally, deciding what content is legal and what should be banned is the responsibility of the government. Governments are bound by constitutions, accountable to voters, and their decision-making processes are recorded. Visa is not subject to these constraints. Its "Brand Protection Policy" is an internal document, the formulation process is not public, the enforcement standards are opaque, and the affected parties have no voice.

In 2020, Visa and Mastercard cut off payment channels for Pornhub, and the platform deleted 10 million videos overnight. In 2025, the same mechanism forced Steam and Itch.io to purge their content libraries. The pattern is clearly visible: advocacy groups send letters → media reports → payment companies conduct "brand risk assessments" → platforms comply or are eliminated.

The entire process involves no democratic participation. Voters have no vote, affected creators have no hearing, and the basis for decisions is never disclosed.

Why are payment companies willing to play such a role? Economics provides the answer. For processing an adult content transaction, Visa earns about a 2% fee. Suppose a creator has a monthly turnover of $1,000; Visa's income is $20. But if the front page of The New York Times reports that "Visa provides payment channels for child sexual abuse material," Visa's stock price could drop by 1%. For a company with a market capitalization of $250 billion, this represents a loss of about $5 billion in market value. Between a $20 profit and a $5 billion risk, the arithmetic is a no-brainer.

The actions of payment companies are not for the purpose of "protecting children," but to protect their stock price. Sometimes the two overlap, sometimes they don't. When the two conflict, the stock price always takes priority.

The Infrastructure of Loneliness

The adult industry is undergoing a profound transformation: from a "content industry" to a "companionship industry."

The "Herbivore men" phenomenon in Japan, the "Sampo generation" in South Korea, "Lying flat" in China, and the decline in dating participation among young men in the United States—all developed economies globally are experiencing similar trends: young people are withdrawing from the traditional intimacy market. The reasons are complex, including economic pressure, housing costs, degradation of social skills, and the choice overload brought by dating apps.

AI companions are precisely the product of this trend. It is not that AI created loneliness, but that loneliness created the market for AI companions. Technology is merely filling a void that already existed.

At the 2025 CES exhibition, Realbotix released "Aria," a humanoid companion robot. Its promotional focus was not on "sexual function" but on "emotional connection." The product description emphasized: Aria can remember conversations, understand emotions, and proactively initiate interactions. In other words, this is a companion who will not leave, rather than a simple sex toy.

Although technical bottlenecks remain, engineers' design choices are very pragmatic: current robots prioritize optimizing facial animations and upper-body interactions, giving up autonomous walking capabilities. After all, what users truly need is not a robot walking around, but a face that can smile, nod, and say "I understand."

The AI girlfriend app market was valued at approximately $2.8 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $24.5 billion by 2034. Google searches for "AI Girlfriend" grew by 2400% between 2022 and 2024. That is not 2.4 times, but 24 times.

A disturbing observation is that the core difficulty of human relationships lies in reciprocity. Real relationships require compromise, communication, and enduring the other person's flaws. AI relationships, however, are one-way—always cooperative, always available, and never complaining. From a user experience perspective, AI relationships seem "better," if one ignores the premise that a "relationship" inherently requires two-way interaction.

The future of the adult industry may not lie in higher-quality content, but in more authentic solutions for loneliness. The speed of technological progress is catching up with the speed at which humans are becoming lonelier.

Three Paths

Over the next five years, the adult industry will develop along three paths. These three paths are not independent options but a self-reinforcing spiral.

Path one drives path two: The weaponization of payments. Visa and Mastercard will continue to act as de facto content regulators. Every "brand risk" incident will trigger platform purges, and the industry will fragment further. Rising compliance costs will squeeze the survival space of small and medium creators, large platforms will become more concentrated, and small platforms may turn to cryptocurrency payments, entering gray areas that are harder to regulate and carry higher risks. When mainstream platforms are purged, where will users turn? The answer is VR and AI.

Path two accelerates path three: The popularization of immersive experiences. VR adult content will move from the fringe to the mainstream. By 2028, major VR platforms will have to face policy choices on "how to handle adult content." Apple may continue to pretend to ignore it, and Meta may continue to avoid public discussion, but user behavior will tell the whole story. As live-action content shrinks due to rising compliance costs, AI-generated content will fill the void.

Path three feeds back into path one: The industrialization of relationship substitution. AI companions will transform from novelty products into a real market. By 2030, "AI girlfriends/boyfriends" may be as ubiquitous as dating apps. AI companions do not need payment channels, have no real people receiving money, and naturally, there is no lifeline that Visa can cut. The ultimate irony of payment weaponization is that this pressure actually accelerates the rise of an alternative that does not require payments.

The endpoints of the three paths converge: real humans will gradually exit this industry. This is not because demand has disappeared, but because the cost of real humans is too high, there are too many problems, and regulation is too easy.

A verifiable prediction: Before December 31, 2028, at least one mainstream tech company with a market capitalization exceeding $100 billion will publicly admit that adult content is one of the primary use cases for its platform, or face shareholder litigation for refusing to admit it. If this prediction is not realized by the end of 2028, then the judgment was incorrect.

Two weeks after the launch of the $3,499 Vision Pro, adult traffic grew by 400%. The embarrassment of Tim Cook and the embarrassment of Akio Morita are separated by forty years, yet the plot is identical.

In the $19 billion VR adult market, 97% of revenue comes from subscriptions. The business models of gyms and adult websites are identical: renewal rates are higher than usage rates.

A single letter forced Steam to remove hundreds of games. Payment companies act at the speed of a business cycle, while Congress moves at a geological pace. The legislators without votes have won.

Searches for AI girlfriends grew 24-fold. This is not the growth of pornography, but the growth of loneliness. The speed of technological progress is catching up with the speed at which humans are becoming lonelier.

The future of the adult industry may not lie in higher-quality content, but in more authentic solutions for loneliness.

12 The Oldest Business

In July 2025, Collective Shout (an Australian anti-pornography organization) wrote an open letter to Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe.

The demand was simple: stop providing payment services to platforms containing adult content.

A few days later, Steam delisted hundreds of games. Itch.io removed all NSFW content. No hearings, no legal proceedings, no appeals mechanism. Valve's statement was just one sentence: losing payment methods would prevent customers from purchasing other games on Steam.

One letter, three days, hundreds of products disappeared.

In December 2020, the same script: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an article criticizing Pornhub. Credit card companies applied pressure, and the platform deleted over 10 million videos overnight. In 2018, Patreon purged adult creators. In 2021, OnlyFans announced a ban on sexual content (withdrawn less than a week later following creator protests).

The pattern is predictable: advocacy groups write letters → media coverage → payment companies perform "risk assessments" → platforms comply or die.

How long does it take for the U.S. Congress to pass a bill regarding adult content? The EARN IT Act was first proposed in 2020 and is still sitting in committee in 2025. Federal legislation moves at a geological pace. Visa's compliance department moves at a Twitter cycle.

Visa and Mastercard process 85% of global card transactions. The compliance departments of these two companies have become the de facto legislatures for the adult industry: a hundred times faster than Congress, harder to appeal than the Supreme Court, elected by and accountable to shareholders.

The Fifty-Year Cycle

In 1976, at the Consumer Electronics Show, VHS and Betamax fought for the home video recorder market. Betamax had better picture quality; VHS had longer recording times. By technical metrics, Betamax should have won.

The adult industry chose VHS. The reason was pragmatic: longer recording times could fit an entire movie. Some say Sony's Akio Morita felt pornographic content was beneath Betamax's high-end positioning. Whether true or not, consumers followed the content. A few years later, Betamax exited the market.

How much was Sony's loftiness worth? The entire home video recorder market.

This story is told repeatedly, yet the lesson is never learned.

In the 1990s, the internet rose. Online payment systems were developed for adult sites because legitimate merchants were unwilling to take the risk. Online subscription models were validated by adult sites because users were willing to pay for privacy. High bandwidth demand was driven by adult streaming because text chat wasn't enough; video was needed. While Yahoo was burning venture capital, adult sites were already profitable. While Jeff Bezos was still packing books in a garage, adult sites were already validating the feasibility of the "subscription economy."

In the 2000s, the mobile revolution. Adult content was one of the primary consumption scenarios for smartphone traffic. "Anytime, anywhere" private viewing changed consumption patterns. Steve Jobs talked about "changing the world" at launch events but never mentioned who the early adopters of that change were.

In the 2020s, AI and VR. Over 50 free AI-generated adult content websites. The VR adult content market is projected to grow 25-fold in 5 years. Two weeks after the Apple Vision Pro launch, traffic to VRPorn.com from Apple devices grew by 400%. Cook's embarrassment and Morita's embarrassment, forty years apart, the script hasn't changed.

New technology → Adult industry commercializes first → Social panic → Regulatory catch-up → Technology iterates again.

Why is it always this order? Because desire is the most honest early adopter. Desire doesn't look at financial reports or care about brand image; it only asks one question: Is the experience good enough? For a $3,499 device, the first validated killer app is adult content, because no one spends $3,499 to check email, but they will spend it for an immersive experience.

The VHS era worried about "video stores poisoning youth." The internet era worried about "what children will see online." The AI era worries that "anyone can generate anything."

The object of panic has changed, but the pattern of panic has not. The object of regulation has changed, but the regulatory lag has not. The pursuers have never won this race, yet every generation believes this time is different.

Four Judgments

Twelve chapters of content, compressed into four core judgments. If I am wrong, please come back and point out where.

First, power is being privatized. Traditionally, deciding what content is legal and what should be banned is a government function. Governments are bound by constitutions, accountable to voters, and leave records of their decision-making processes. Visa and Mastercard are not subject to any such constraints. The "Brand Protection Policies" of these two companies are internal documents; the formulation process is not public, the enforcement standards are opaque, and the affected parties have no voice. Pornhub in 2020, Steam in 2025—it's the same process every time: no hearing, no defense, no appeal. Censorship power has shifted from Congress to the compliance departments of credit card companies. For the first time in history, the boundaries of speech are determined by the quarterly earnings considerations of private enterprises.

This is identical to the power structure of 19th-century railroad companies. Back then, railroad companies decided which towns could have train service and which farms' grain could be shipped out. Places without a railroad were economically non-existent. The birth of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was precisely because the infrastructure power of private companies had grown to a level that required regulation. The role Visa and Mastercard play today is that of the digital age's railroad companies: they don't produce content, but they decide what content can circulate. The difference is that railroad companies were eventually regulated; payment companies have not been yet.

Second, risk is trickling down. OnlyFans takes 20% and bears 0% risk. Creators bear production costs, marketing costs, legal risks, psychological costs, and social stigma, receiving the remaining 80%. It sounds like an 80/20 split, but it's actually zero versus one hundred: zero risk for the platform, one hundred percent risk for the creator. Uber drivers face a similar structure, but Uber drivers can change jobs. OnlyFans creators need to change their identities. When exit costs differ, bargaining power differs. The essence of the platform economy is risk arbitrage: offloading risk to individuals, keeping profits for the platform, and packaging it all as "empowerment" and "entrepreneurship."

Third, scale dissolves the neutrality of tools. A kitchen knife can cut vegetables or kill people; this analogy is used to defend all technology. But kitchen knives have no scale effect. One person with one knife can only harm a limited number of people. One person with one Stable Diffusion model can generate infinite deepfake pornography. The same technology can generate adult entertainment or child sexual abuse material. Generation speed is measured in seconds; detection speed is measured in days; legislative speed is measured in years. The moral neutrality of tools becomes a joke in the face of scale.

Fourth, all arguments are avoiding the real question. "Pornography addiction" is a political term, not a scientific consensus (neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11 recognizes this diagnosis). But while this term is being debated, more than half of 13-year-old boys have already viewed pornographic content. The policy telescope is pointed in the wrong direction. The real question isn't "addiction or not," but rather: as the age of first contact continues to drop, the cost of content generation approaches zero, and AI can simulate intimacy, what changes will occur in human expectations of intimacy itself? No one is asking this question because there is no simple policy answer.

These four judgments cannot solve the problem. The answers that can solve the problem are not in this report.

An Open Future

This report provides several falsifiable predictions. They are recorded here for future verification.

By 2027, victims of deepfake pornography will expand from "celebrities + ordinary people" to "anyone with a social media photo." The technical threshold for generating a realistic pornographic video will drop to "mobile app + 30 seconds." If this has not happened by December 31, 2027, this prediction is wrong.

By 2027, OnlyFans will face exactly the same payment crisis Pornhub did in 2020. Credit card companies will demand OnlyFans strengthen content moderation or face card disconnection for similar reasons. If OnlyFans still maintains a normal partnership with Visa/Mastercard by the end of 2027 without undergoing major policy adjustments, this prediction is wrong.

By 2028, the global VPN market size will grow by at least 30% due to adult content regulation. If VPN market growth is below 30% by the end of 2028 (excluding incremental corporate VPN use), this prediction is wrong.

By 2028, at least one mainstream tech company (with a market value exceeding $100 billion) will publicly admit that adult content is one of its platform's primary use cases, or face shareholder litigation for refusing to admit it. Apple, Meta, or one of their successors will have to answer this question. If this prediction has not occurred by the end of 2028, this judgment is wrong.

These predictions may all be wrong. The value of a prediction lies not in being correct, but in being falsifiable. If the predictions are all correct, it shows this report understands the operational logic of this industry. If they are all wrong, it shows the report missed key variables. In either case, it is progress.

Will Visa and Mastercard continue to be de facto content censors? Pornhub in 2020, Steam in 2025. The pattern is established. The question is where the boundary lies and who decides. The shareholders of these two companies did not vote to grant this power. Billions of users did not elect anyone to be a content arbiter. Power comes from market monopoly, not democratic mandate.

The only certainty is uncertainty. Technology updates every year. Law updates every decade. This gap will define the future, whatever it looks like.

In 2023, OnlyFans paid $5.32 billion to 4.12 million creators. That averages to $1,291 per person, or $108 per month. In the same year, the top 1% of creators on the platform took 33% of the income, and the top 10% took 73%. The remaining 90% shared the remaining 27%.

The business models of lottery companies and OnlyFans are identical: use the stories of a tiny number of big winners to attract 4.12 million participants, taking a fixed percentage from each participant to ensure the house always wins. The difference is: lottery companies must state the odds of winning in their advertisements; OnlyFans does not. Every "million-a-month" headline is a free advertisement for OnlyFans; no one writes reports about "making $108 a month."

A story where the hero is absent. No villain, no redemption, no ending. Only millions of people making similar choices within the same structure, each weighing similar costs. Those reading this report might be consumers, creators, policymakers, or just bystanders. Regardless of identity, everyone is in this system.

Human desire is the oldest constant. The way desire is satisfied is the newest variable.

The oldest business, the newest technological experiment. Behind every number (4.12 million creators, 36.2 million reports, more than half of 13-year-old boys) is a real person bearing real consequences.

Technology will continue to evolve. Desire will long exist. Regulation will repeatedly play catch-up. Payment companies will continue to act as legislators without votes. People fifty years from now looking back at 2025 will see it like we look back at the VHS war of 1976: What were people worried about then? Did the choices made then make things better or worse?

The answer depends on who is answering. For Visa shareholders, 2025 is a victory for "brand protection." For delisted Steam developers, 2025 is a death sentence without trial. For the top 1% of the 4.12 million OnlyFans creators, 2025 is a gold rush. For the remaining 99%, 2025 is another ordinary year averaging $108 a month.

The oldest business. The newest technology. The most familiar structure. The most uncertain future.