The owner of OnlyFans is in talks with an investment firm over a potential sale for $8 billion.
May 22 (Reuters) – OnlyFans owner Fenix International Ltd is in talks to sell the porn-driven company to an investor group at a valuation of around $8 billion, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The group is led by the Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, the sources said. Reuters could not identify the investors in the group.
Six billion dollars might sound like a lot (and it is!), but consider that in 2023 alone it generated $6.6 billion in revenue, a massive jump from the $375 million it made in 2020. I watched a YouTuber claim last night that the decision to put OnlyFans up for sale was a response to the release of Google’s new video generator VEO3, stunning examples of which have taken the Internet by storm and which is not only incredibly realistic, but comes with sound and voice. This seems unlikely as VEO 3 was only released last week and the decision to sell, and presumably also the talks with the investment company, were surely made earlier for it to be reported upon already.
However, I wonder if he knew that the writing was on the wall for the OnlyFans business model with the rapid speed of progress in AI-generated video? Whilst NSFW video generators are still playing catch-up with the mainstream video tech, it’s only a matter of time before we see the same quality as VEO 3. Eight billion dollars for a company that is making almost as much as that each year, and has grown from ‘just’ $375 million in the space of 3 years, sounds like a fire sale to me.
The thing about AI videos isn’t that they might become ‘better’ or ‘sexier’ than the real thing, or even that porn fans can generate their own tailored videos, it’s that there will be no way to tell what is real or what isn’t soon. And how will a site like OnlyFans be able to verify somebody is a real human being, when even things like passports and birth certificates can easily be faked?
People might always pay more for a real human connection, but not if they can’t believe that the person is real.
Porn and Sex in an AGI World With Few Jobs
Whilst many still maintain that AI is “over-hyped”, it’s clear that even if AI progress slowed dramatically, it will still have huge effects upon pretty much everything over the next decade. But let’s assume that AI reaches the level of humans (AGI) quite soon, and most jobs are taken over. What might porn and sex look like in 2030? Who will be the winners and losers?
As mentioned above, it will be impossible to know what is real and not when it comes to viewing a sexy picture or video online. So it probably is over for OnlyFans and the home-based amateur adult influencer. Porn studios, especially ones already established today, might see their fortunes revive, as they will be more trusted to be producing the real thing. Of course, there are many uncertainties with regards to legislation and regulation. There is also the question as to what the average porn fan will prefer – watching ‘real’ pornstars in live action recorded videos (whether VR or 2D), or engaging in hyper-realistic interactive VR porn games. We just don’t have enough information yet to make an educated guess.
As far as sex and dating is concerned, it’s even harder to make anything more than speculative shot in the dark. What will people do when there is little or no work for them, and their lives are entirely filled with leisure? Well, we do have quite a lot of information there to work on, as there have always been certain segments of the population in such a situation or something like it – for example, those on welfare or many of the upper-classes. What we can say is that they do tend to fuck a lot, as well as have lots of children. But all this is dependent upon how societies react to these changes. Perhaps people or governments will demand a more conservative and uptight culture, backed by law, to prevent people just sitting around fucking all day?
But I do think that attitudes towards sex might become markedly different in a world where most people might have nothing much more to do than ‘fuck around’, and who likely crave real human-connection in an AI world. If AI destroys the OnlyFans model, perhaps we will see an explosion in human contact sex work (i.e. prostitution). But now we need to factor in the impact of sex robots and AI girlfriends..
