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The Verge
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
What's a smut peddler to do these days?
In the aftermath of pulling the sale of over 20,000 pages of adult content, the creators of that work are left feeling betrayed, exhausted, and fearful. The number of platforms that permit the sale of adult material is shrinking, and there's no guarantee the ones that remain will still permit it in the future. But now, with their livelihoods at stake, many creators and their communities have begun to push back and search for new ways to thrive. 'Before [ the NSFW comics community would grouse and complain and share feelings of anxiety,' said Brad Guigar, a smut comic artist. 'This time around, we're actually doing something about it.' For some, that means organizing massive call campaigns to pressure payment processors to reverse course and allow to host the content it had before. Others have decided to abandon the fickleness of platforms for their own websites. And yet others have decided that if they can't sell their game directly, they'll just make it free. To some creators, the most disheartening thing about removing thousands of pages of adult content is that it's relatively unsurprising. The storefront is one of several in recent years that have embraced adult content only to shun it later when payment processors start asking questions. They've now found themselves booted from platform to platform, moving from Tumblr to Patreon to Gumroad, only to have the rug pulled out from under them each time. 'This time around, we're actually doing something about it.' When adult creators are regularly forced to find new places for their work, their business overall suffers. 'I can never get ahead,' said PixelJail, a creator who makes BDSM and other kink-related comics and illustrations. 'I have to stop doing paid work to set up new accounts, backlog posting, pay for new subscriptions or services' and other administrative tasks. PixelJail has now opted to set up their own websites. But even without the burden of conforming to a platform's rules, having one's own website isn't a guarantee of absolute safety. In the UK, where PixelJail lives, the recently implemented Online Safety Act requires that online platforms have 'strong age checks' in place to prevent children from accessing pornographic or 'harmful' content. 'I had to geoblock my websites in the UK, including my webstore,' PixelJail said, meaning they no longer sell their work in their own country. Laws like the UK's Online Safety Act are slowly proliferating across the United States. The US Supreme Court recently ruled that age verification laws do not violate the First Amendment and many states are now requiring adult content sites to implement age verification tools, which can be expensive and subject to privacy concerns. Rather than comply, sites like PornHub have simply decided to cease operations in areas where those laws are in effect. Individual creators might have to make a similar choice. 'I made my site years ago and didn't use it much at first,' PixelJail said. 'But it's gradually become the only real place I can go to sell and even now, that's at risk.' Creator platforms have repeatedly been forced to exile adult content creators. In 2017, Patreon tightened its rules related to adult content causing some of those creators to abandon the site with man choosing to set up shop with Gumroad, another e-commerce platform. Then, last year, Gumroad banned virtually all sexually explicit material, causing yet another adult creator mass migration. You can follow the line of adult creators hopping from platform to platform fleeing content bans all the way back to one website: Tumblr. 'From between 2012 to 2018, there was a huge, and I truly do mean huge NSFW community on Tumblr,' said DieselBrain, a smut artist specializing in monster kink. For many of the creators I spoke to, the 'Tumblr Purge' of 2018, where the social media site outright banned all adult content, was their first experience with having their previously accepted work suddenly prohibited. 'This kicked the entire community off of there, and I'd argue that we never really recovered fully,' Dieselbrain said. It's easy to see how. When porn creators move from one platform to another they bring their communities with them creating an influx of traffic that would please any website. Then, after reaping the benefits of all those new eyeballs (in addition to a portion of the transactions those new eyeballs make), sites dispose of the reason for its newfound success. This was almost the case with OnlyFans, which, in 2020, briefly flirted with banning adult content, the kind of material the website was universally known for. In every case, payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard were the culprit for these crackdowns. While all payment processors have guidelines prohibiting the sale of illegal material, many host platforms overcorrect, banning material that would ostensibly be permitted in order to avoid the increased scrutiny (and cost) hosting that content requires. 'We have been asked to be more rigorous in enforcing our ToS and must comply,' Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia said in an interview with TechCrunch regarding its ban of adult content. Lavingia declined to name the specific company asking. To blunt the blow caused by platform disruption, creators often turn to their communities, both the ones made up of other creators, or those made up of their personal fans. They act as information networks, sharing news about where a creator may have set up shop and are more generally an avenue of commiseration and support. To help his fellow artists navigate the recent events with Guigar, the NSFW artist, started a newsletter for adult creators called Uncensored Artists. The developer Cara Cadaver is leveraging her community to help support her game VILE: Exhumed. She made the game available for free on the Internet Archive after it was banned from Steam, which, according to her, was done under false pretenses. 'There are a lot of intense visuals in VILE: Exhumed,' Cara Cadaver wrote. 'But there is no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography whatsoever – which is one of the justifications bad actors are using right now to censor games.' Though the game is free, there are options to support Cadaver directly through donations, half of which, she said, will be donated to charity. 'This censorship of my work is a direct attack on creative expression and artistic freedom, and it will not stop with false accusations of sexual content,' Cadaver said. There has virtually never been a stable time to be an adult creator on the internet. To them, it feels unfair to have come to places like Tumblr, Patreon, Gumroad, and now places that were tolerant of the kinds of work they did, only to have those places taken away, often without warning or recourse, leaving them with one less way to make a living. 'Most of the creators I know are everyday people with bills to pay mired in late stage capitalism,' said Mesmereye, an artist who specializes in hypnosis kink. 'When you have a body, a camera, and an internet connection, why shouldn't you try to put the proverbial bread on the table with the assets and talents you're born with?' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Ash Parrish Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Analysis Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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Fast Company
11-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Yahoo Creators platform hits record revenue as publisher bets big on influencer-led content
Yahoo's bet on creator-led content appears to be paying off. Yahoo Creators, the media company's publishing platform for creators, had its most lucrative month yet in June. Launched in March 2024, Yahoo Creators was built to capitalize on the growing appetite for personality-driven content. Now, a little more than a year in, the platform is gaining momentum: Last month marked its highest revenue and engagement levels since launch, a spokesperson told Digiday. Historically, Yahoo has aggregated stories from around the web and produced original journalism through its in-house newsroom. Now it's also staking its claim in the creator economy. According to Digiday, the program currently includes 135 lifestyle-focused creators, whose work is featured prominently on Yahoo's homepage. There's a dedicated creator vertical, and creator content is woven throughout the Yahoo app and newsletters, appearing alongside articles from traditional publishers. There's even a waiting list of influencers eager to join. Selected creators have access to monetization tools, affiliate commerce, and audience analytics in exchange for posting on the platform. While the program focuses mainly on written content, creators can embed audio and video. Yahoo offers a 50-50 split on ad revenue—comparable to platforms like Substack and YouTube. 'We hear consistently that people want to get their news from other people,' Kat Downs Mulder, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, previously told Fast Company. 'They have institutions they trust, but they also really want connections. . . . In addition to the publisher network that we have, and the journalists that we have in-house, creators would add an additional dimension to that content. And so it would really help us to flesh out that whole ecosystem of content as we really look to become the world's best guide to the internet.' Since launch, revenue, engagement, and feedback have all been positive. 'Yahoo's new media model is wild (and maybe genius),' Michelle Songy, founder of Press Hook, posted on LinkedIn last month. 'Legacy media is finally taking notes from creators, and honestly, I'm here for it.'
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
TikTok Launches Bulletin Boards for Broadcast Messaging from Creator and Brand Profiles
This story was originally published on Social Media Today. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Social Media Today newsletter. TikTok's experimenting with its own variation of broadcast channels, which enables brands and creators to share message updates with their audience in the app. As you can see in this example, shared by creator economy expert Lia Haberman, some brand profiles on TikTok now have a new link to what it's calling 'Bulletin Boards.' Bulletin Boards in this context are one-to-many DM chats, with these profiles then able to post updates, including text, image and video content, that their fans can follow. As reported by social media expert Lindsey Gamble: 'Creators with access can create a Bulletin Board directly from their inbox by tapping a plus sign. From there, they can name it, write a description, and decide whether to display a 'Join' button on their profile. Inside a Bulletin Board, creators and brands can share text, photos, and videos with a limit of 20 bulletins daily.' Each individual bulletin is restricted to 1,000 characters, with the posts then displayed in a message-like feed. Here's another example, posted by TikTok user Ayaz QA: Fans can react to these messages, but they cannot reply, providing another means for creators and brands to feed updates through to their TikTok audience. Which is very similar to Instagram's Broadcast Channels, which it launched back in 2023. As part of its effort to meet users where they're most active, Instagram added Broadcast Channels to help creators tap into the rise of messaging in the app, and provide another means for both creators and brands to stay connected with their audience. Because as Instagram chief Adam Mosseri noted earlier this year: 'If you look at how people share on Instagram, creators aside, there are more photos and videos not including text shared in DMs than there are in Stories every day, and there are way more photos and videos shared into Stories than into feed every day.' So the main feed is now third on the list of overall engagement, with more and more people turning to private chats to maintain connection. Broadcast Channels, then, provides a valuable connective option, and TikTok is now leaning into the same, as sit looks to expand its usage. YouTube also has its own variation, in Communities, which enables channels to share social-like updates with their subscribers (though users can reply to these posts). TikTok has actually been testing its Bulletin Boards in some regions for the last few months, with some creators highlighting the option to their fans back in March. I asked TikTok for more info on the roll-out of the option, and how it works, but they had not got back to me at the time of publication, though TikTok has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is now testing the option with a range of users. It could provide another engagement and community-building option in the app, where brands can share exclusive promotions, sneak peeks, etc. I mean, DMs are not as big of a deal on TikTok, so getting people to follow your Bulletin Board could be a little more difficult, but some of the initial boards already have hundreds of thousands of followers. Those include big-name brands, like football club Paris St. Germain and the Jonas Brothers. It's a little easier for these profiles to gain followers in the app, but as more of these Bulletin Boards come online, that will then build more habitual following behaviors, which will expand opportunities. It's another consideration either way. As noted TikTok, hasn't shared any info on its roll-out plans, nor who has, or will have access to the option. But it seems to be rolling out to more brand and creator profiles over time. We'll update this post with more info if/when TikTok shares it. Recommended Reading TikTok Announces Its 2024 Super Bowl Tailgate Event Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
