Adult content on the internet is in kind of an odd space right now, at least from an economic perspective. At one extreme there’s a handful of premium content creators (like Kink, Femme Fatale Films, Femdom Empire, etc.) and at the other extreme there are countless free sites (blogs, tumblrs, instagrams, etc.), often packed with content from the premium creators. In between there really isn’t much. If you’re not making expensive movies, or making ad revenue by stealing other people’s expensive movies, then it’s hard to see how money can be made. That strikes me as an unhealthy situation to be in.
Of course this isn’t unique to the adult area – as newspaper, magazine and encyclopedia companies will tell you. It’s the classic micropayment problem. There’s no good way to make quick, easy and small financial transactions for online products. It gets even trickier in the adult realm however, thanks to the persistent discrimination by banks and credit card companies against sex related industries. Engadget published a very depressing and eye-opening article on that back in 2015, and the situation certainly hasn’t improved since then.
One possible solution to this is the Patreon model. I’ve written about this briefly in the past. It’s a system that allows you to set up just a single account with a credit card and then give just a few bucks a month to content creators you like. They aggregate the payments together (minimizing the hidden credit card fees) and users don’t need to enter credit card details anytime they want to tip a content creator.
It’s an approach that seems to be gaining some traction. For example, Bacchus at ErosBlog has set up one to support more in depth writing and deep dives on his site. Violet Blue has one to support her work on her Tiny Nibbles site. Erika Moen has one for her excellent Oh Joy Sex Toy comics, and so on.
The challenge can be finding the interesting stuff. So what I’ll try and do in the future is periodically put up a post with some femdom and kink related Patreon creators. That’ll point readers at fun new stuff and hopefully send a few dollars towards the people who actually create all this great art. For today’s post I’ll take the chance to (again) feature something by one of my favorite artists – Yumine Guo. Her Patreon account can be found here.
This image is from her Storyland tumblr.