These Adult Sites Are the Latest to Close Down Because of Big Banks

Queer and trans sex workers are losing yet another way to get paid.
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The latest battle in the Porn Wars has reached a lousy but predictable conclusion: Two more adult content websites are functionally closing up shop, leaving survival sex workers out in the cold.

On Wednesday, AVN Media Network, an adult entertainment and news company originally known as Adult Video News, announced that their platforms AVN Stars and GayVN Stars will “discontinue all monetization features” beginning January 1, 2022. CEO Tony Rios cited “banking discrimination” as the primary reason for the change.

“Unfortunately, AVN and GayVN Stars has not been immune to the banking discrimination that so many of our industry friends have also encountered recently,” Rios said in a press release. “We have had numerous corporate accounts shuttered in the past year alone.”

The two sites operated on the now-ubiquitous “fan club” model popularized by OnlyFans, in which creators post content to a private feed accessible via a monthly subscription fee. Adult creators on both platforms will have until the end of the month to collect on sales, but “beginning on January 1, AVN and GayVN Stars will only make content available that is free,” per the company’s statement.

Especially after the 2018 enactment of SESTA-FOSTA — a federal law ostenisbly intended to curb sex trafficking that has been used more broadly to target online sex work — many banking institutions and payment processors have barred many types of transactions on adult websites. Other sites, including XTube, have also shut down in part due to pressure from anti-porn advocacy groups that gained cultural force during the Trump presidency.

These unexpected shutdowns can be gutting for thousands of sex workers, many of whom moved to or increased their presence on AVN platforms after the confusing OnlyFans debacle earlier this year. (Within the span of a week this August, OnlyFans announced, and then reversed, limitations on explicit content.)

Rios attempted to spin the change as a positive for the company’s “core offerings” like the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas and their annual industry awards show, but that’s little comfort to the many queer and trans sex workers who will now have to find yet another platform to safely sell their wares — during the winter holidays, no less.

Onlyfans logo on an iphone.
The company will continue to allow sexually explicit content on its site.

The news came as a shock to many sex workers, given AVN’s market share in the industry and their platforms’ growing popularity over competitors like OnlyFans. But, as Rios alludes, no adult entertainment company is immune to the puritanical backlash against online porn.

With banks making it increasingly difficult for adult performers and platforms to earn money from (checks notes) one of the main things we all use the Internet for, there has been an increasing push for the industry to move towards cryptocurrencies, which would circumvent the banking discrimination AVN decries.

But even setting aside the disastrous environmental implications of cryptocurrency mining, the barrier to entry is still high for the average consumer, so it would take time for adult content creators to reestablish their revenue streams if traditional banks are entirely cut out of the equation.

Ultimately, AVN’s shuttering is simply more bad news in a lousy year for LGBTQ+ survival sex workers. Decriminalization when?

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