“four percent of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans” (from my email)

 [[{“value”:”Andrew Cedotal writes me: This issue came up with the post where someone claimed that N% of Americans were active OnlyFans content creators, here it is again! For software services, total accounts ever created is a vanity metric. It’s not used by serious operators or investors of consumer-tech companies (the fact that it shows up in public
The post “four percent of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans” (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

Andrew Cedotal writes me:

This issue came up with the post where someone claimed that N% of Americans were active OnlyFans content creators, here it is again!

For software services, total accounts ever created is a vanity metric. It’s not used by serious operators or investors of consumer-tech companies (the fact that it shows up in public financial reports so often thus has interesting implications).

The social impact/business value of a software service is about flow (e.g. monthly active users and monthly revenue), not stock. 100 real human signups means many, many fewer actual monthly active users (MAU) at any point, because users churn out. Even the best-retaining services around (e.g. Snap) only have 90% yearly retention, which then compounds downward.

Then there’s the issue that for any public software service, many accounts are bots, throwaways, people who forgot their password, etc.

Rather than make a truly wild guesstimate, let’s look at a frontier based on the report of $6.6B gross payments made by users in 2023 (so average revenue / month is $0.55B). All of the following are possible points on the frontier of paying MAU (paying monthly active users) vs. monthtly APPPU (monthly payments per paying user):

*   10 million paying MAU,      $55 monthly APPPU
*   30 million paying MAU, $18.33 monthly APPPU
*   50 million paying MAU,      $11 monthly APPPU
* 100 million paying MAU,     $5.5 monthly APPPU

(Industry standard is to look at ARPPU–average revenue per paying user–and not average payments, but I think here we’re more interested in determining how much money users are putting into it and ignoring platform take rate, not a financial analysis of the company.)

Now, OnlyFans might have ~300M total signups ever, but let’s assume half of those are dupes and bots. So 150M real human signups. It’s unlikely that more than 20% of people who have ever created an account have ever entered a credit card, so that’s 300 * 0.5 * .2 = 30M as a cap on people who have ever paid. Take into account userbase churn, and a guess is ~12M monthly paying accounts right now (0.15% of humanity, not 4%), which would put them at $45.83 monthly APPPU or a yearly APPPU of ~$550. About the annual cost of a gym membership in the U.S.

The post “four percent of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans” (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Data Source, Web/Tech