Crowdfunding: Is There Porn Of It?
For reasons that will be explained in a post appearing soon, I am looking into crowdfunding (preferably Patreon-style) in order to try and improve the depth and quality of posting here at ErosBlog. However, I am reluctant to use a crowdfunding platform that’s openly hostile to porn. There seems to be a crowdfunding-industry consensus around allowing adult projects (sort of) as long as they are not “pornography” or “sexually explicit”, leaving those terms undefined. The rules on all platforms currently seem to boil down to some version of “We’ll allow your adult project, but if it becomes contentious or attracts any sort of negative attention, we’re reserving the right to redefine whatever you’re doing as ‘porn’ and blow you off our platform while pretending you were never welcome in the first place.”
Trouble is, I’m proud of the fact that everything I do is porn, even if it’s also erotic art curation or forensic photoarcheology or deep-dive provenance research into viral photographs or reluctant investigative journalism and cynical commentary about platforms used by pornography enthusiasts. So I’m looking for a crowdfunding platform that won’t make me lie about what I love to do. I don’t doubt that with a bit of careful fancy-dancing I could use one of the porn-squeamish platforms, at least for awhile. But I would hate to get invested (or to get my patrons invested) in a platform where the official policy is to prohibit porn officially while tolerating it on a case-by-case basis as long as it doesn’t get too uppity.
Here are the results of my first round of quick research into the porn policies at a few of the most popular platforms that sometimes allow adult projects:
- Patreon: “Patreon is not for pornography.”
Patreon is not for pornography, but some of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant art often depicts nudity and sexual expression. Because of that, we allow nudity and suggestive imagery, as long as it is marked NSFW. If your work contains nudity or any material that could potentially be offensive to users, make absolutely sure to mark the page as NSFW in the creator description when creating your page. Think of the policy as allowing “R Rated” movies… but not porn.
- Indiegogo: currently prohibits “sexually explicit” projects.
Do not post images or videos that are sexually explicit or post links to sites that contain sexually explicit material.
- Kickstarter: “We prohibit…pornographic material.”
- Offbeatr: Closed 2/8/16. Sounds like #pornocalypse in action:
We’d like to thank all our customers and users for supporting Offbeatr throughout our years but the website will be closing indefinitely due to changes in corporate structure.
So, what have I missed? Is there a single crowdfunding platform out there that is officially open to projects featuring pornography and sexually explicit material?
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=16293
I didn’t see anything in their FAQ’s either way, but check out Plumfund – may be a possibility?
I believe the problem is less with the funding sites and more with the banks and card processors. The US government has pressured the credit card companies and banks to refuse to do business with porn companies. There were stories late last year about banks closing checking accounts belonging to porn stars. Whether this is a back-door attempt to stop porn or a way to force the sex industry to deal in cash which can then be seized under asset forfeiture laws I couldn’t say. CCBill is the only card processor I know of that is willing to deal with porn sites.
Hey, Aimee, thank you! That’s exactly the sort of leads and suggestions I am fishing for here.
I haven’t quite managed to wrap my head around how Plumfund works, but it looks like they have managed to shuffle the credit card risk Ron mentions off onto the person doing the fund-raising: if you fall afoul of PayPal’s famously opaque rules regarding adult, it’s your personal PayPal account that will suffer (and PayPal will keep all the money) leaving Plumfund completely out of the fight. PayPal has apparently been evolving its adult transactions stance in the last year or so, but there’s not much clarity on what, if any, adult transactions might now be permitted. However Plumfund has some other options that don’t seem to involve direct credit card payments, so I need to study on those a bit more.
Ron, I expect you are right about where some of the trouble originates. It’s a bit unfair to ding the crowdfunding sites for lack of clarity when the banks they deal with famously refuse to provide any. But of course I’m always hoping somebody will crack this tough nut, because there’s an enormous amount of innovation in the adult space that’s impossible to monetize right now due to no reliable and widely-available payment system.
I thought your philosophy was to avoid the pornocalypse by self-hosting. You’ve got an audience, and a place to make your pitch. No one to tell you what you can and can’t do, no one to take a share, or find an excuse to shut you down and/or keep your money. I don’t see why crowdfunding requires a pre-existing platform in this case. Find a way for me to send you money…
I was surprised to see Patreon’s ToS are that strict. I am aware of/follow more than a few projects that I would have thought well beyond on that limit.
However, it occurred to me that most of the projects I follow are text based at heart. The actual Patreon pages are pretty tame. It does make me wonder if those campaigns are close to crossing a line and at risk though.
Good luck in your search.
Collarsmith, you’ve put your finger squarely on the knot of the problem! That is my philosophy when it comes to hosting, but I formed it back in the quaint era of the open web when Google had all the traffic was still an impartial search engine that sent traffic to anybody that got searched for. What I’ve been forced (reluctantly, you might even say “kicking and screaming and dragging my heels”) to acknowledge is that you can’t self-host your own social media network and you for damned skippy can’t self-host an entire financial system. Facebook now has the majority of all the traffic and won’t even allow links to my stuff, and most of the money moves by credit card payments, which are available to pornographers only on an expensive industrial scale.
I don’t have and basically cannot get credit card processing. (That’s an approximation of the truth; it’s *possible* in general but very difficult and expensive; there are further complications that make it look impossible for me.) I’ve got a PayPal account that I can’t afford to risk because I use it extensively in my personal life (and PayPal makes it very difficult to get and keep a spare account.) Basically the only ways I have to take payment directly are cash in the mail and stuff like bitcoin, neither of which is going to realistically work for the great mass of potential funders and patrons. “Find a way” indeed! This post is most assuredly part of that effort, I assure you.
Craig, it’s my impression that all of the adult projects on the existing crowdfunding sites exist at sufferance. Patreon seems to tolerate quite a bit more than its ToS allows. But how perilous is it to build an income stream that can be yanked without recourse the first time a bored customer “service’ rep gets a complaint about it? I may yet try something like that, but as Collarsmith points out, it’s kinda contrary to my brand. I’d much rather do business with somebody who embraces adult business or at least manages to write ToS that don’t sneer at adult.
I agree, having your income relying on another business that could pull it from you is bad enough, Patreon’s ToS would make me hesitant. I know of one project that’s at $20,000+. If one day Patreon says goodbye…ouch.
I wonder if anybody has any experience with the DeliveryCode.com secure wishlist service? From appearances and by reputation, it is a privacy-oriented wish list service designed for use by cams performers. It stands between gifters and recipients, collecting money and orders and placing the orders on behalf of the gifters, so that the gifters never have a chance at learning too much about the identity and location of the recipient. The fees are high ($10 to $20 per item plus a small percentage of value) and seem calibrated to larger gift items (say, sparkly shoes) but there’s also a “gift voucher” system that appears to shave just 15% off of cash gifts, which is not at all bad in the adult world. (I pay more than that to my ad broker for their services in brokering and collecting money, and consider it a bargain.) The TOS seem very value-neutral with no particular restrictions on usage. Anybody know the system and have positive or negative experiences to report?
Have you talked to the people behind MakeLoveNotPorn? They might have some advice on payment streams.
Justin, not directly or recently, but I was following Cindy Gallop on Twitter when she was trying to get her site up and running. My impression (very possibly wrong!) was that her approach was to keep saying “this isn’t porn, it’s better” over and over until she finally exhausted or shamed a banker into giving her some credit card processing. Unfortunately I am neither capable of nor interested in building the “what I do isn’t porn” argument into my operations and my site name.
There are actually DIY and white label crowdfunding options out there that would allow you to just create your own funding portal. I’m not sure what blogging platform you’re using, but I’ve heard some good buzz about IgnitionDeck, which I might be using for a project of my own in the near future. You will have to pay to activate the software, but after that everything is in your hands. You can adjust the rules of the campaign, making it an ongoing effort or a drive with a set goal and deadline as you please. Your only problem with censorship would be ensuring that your payment gateway does not discriminate against adult content.
That being said, no matter what platform you use, there is quite a bit of set-up work involved. You will need to ensure that your website is hardened and secured against hackers, for one. While you shouldn’t be keeping any credit card info on hand (that is the payment gateway’s job), you’ll want to make certain that nothing else you happen to store gets into the hands of cybercriminals. That would be bad for your users, and, potentially, a source of legal liability for you.
Also, although I’m confident you’ve already looked into the matter, it bears repeating that one should always take income and sales tax into consideration during a crowdfunding campaign. Too many crowdfunding sites fail to mention your tax obligation, and I seem to recall Kickstarter advised project creators to consider backer contributions “charitable donations” or somesuch the last time I checked. This is absolutely incorrect: backer contributions are income and are taxed accordingly. Ensuring that you dot your “i”s and cross your “t”s with respect to your legal obligations is essential whether you use a pre-existing platform or not, but it strikes me as especially important when you are building your own platform *and* are offering content that carries significant social stigma.
My payment gateway? That’s the whole of the problem. If I had one of those, I wouldn’t doing this research.
It’s interesting to learn that there’s whitelabel software out there for people who can handle their own card processing, but it’s a bit like the old joke about “If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs… if we had some eggs.” Adult-tolerant credit card processing is very difficult to arrange, with really high fees and some other rules that make it practical only in large volumes. That’s why so many porn sites use third-party processors like CCBill, and it’s why so many people use crowd-funding instead of just putting up a PayPal donation button (which PayPal won’t allow for adult).
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