Tag: pay

The NSFW future of OnlyFans, where celebs, influencers, and sex workers post side by side

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Vex Ashley began working as a cam girl to pay her way through art school. Whatever reservations she had about being a “little weird goth kid” doing porn melted away as she met other performers online who also had a more alternative approach to mainstream adult content. “I thought that to do porn, you had to fit a very rigid stereotype,” Ashley says. “I never was interested in fitting into that mold.” Ashley wanted to infuse porn with a higher level of aesthetics and concepts, using it as a medium to explore ideas rather than purely for viewing pleasure. And if ever there was a tenet of the creator economy, it’s that niche interests can always find an audience. Ashley uploaded experimental videos to Tumblr and quickly gained a following that she took to Patreon in 2014 to better monetize her art and support her production company, Four Chambers . At the height of her success on Patreon, Ashley had more than 3,000 subscribers and was pulling in around $25,000 per month. But after the platform changed its policies in 2018, she effectively lost it all. Vex Ashley [Photo: courtesy of Four Chambers] Like many other adult content creators whose Patreon revenue was decimated, Ashley migrated to OnlyFans in 2018. And like many of her peers, she’s now wary of meeting the same fate on the platform. OnlyFans, which allows creators to charge users a monthly or pay-per-view fee to access content, launched in 2016 with the intention of being for all types of creators but has become a nexus for adult entertainment. Amateur and professionals alike have flocked to OnlyFans as a safe haven to monetize NSFW (not safe for work) content, becoming the key drivers of the platform’s early growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that momentum as more creators looked to OnlyFans as a source of income during record rates of unemployment. Between March and April of last year, OnlyFans experienced a 75% spike in new user and creator registrations. To date, OnlyFans has more than 120 million users and 1 million creators who have earned more than $3 billion collectively (the company takes a 20% cut). Read More …

Why Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize

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This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning journalism nonprofit. It is co-published here with permission. The union organizing drive at the mammoth Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama located 20 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, has the feel of both a social and religious movement. There are five days until the mail-in ballots will be counted to determine whether the company’s 5,800 employees will gain union representation. Last week, organizers and workers gathered at the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s scruffy office to go over their final push and to talk to reporters from around the world who have descended upon Birmingham. Jennifer Bates, an African American “learning ambassador” at the Amazon facility—she trains new workers—believes that her courage to fight the corporate giant comes from a spiritual source, “the Almighty, the creator of all things.” She also traces her personal strength to the civil rights movement that rocked Birmingham in the early 1960s. “I really believe that in this organizing drive we are following the foot soldiers who came before us,” she says. Josh Brewer, the union’s lead organizer, is an ordained minister from Michigan who found his way into the labor union movement while trying to ensure his life had purpose, and he was immediately given some of the toughest organizing challenges. Brewer sees the Amazon campaign as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, his biggest career challenge so far. On this day Brewer has one eye on the office television to see if a tornado sweeping through Mississippi and Alabama is going to require moving into the basement, as he reflects on the five-month and 24/7 commitment that he has made to the unionization effort Read More …

2 former Navy Seals are using robot submarines to build ‘Google Earth’ for the ocean

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In 2005, Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman were a year into their Navy Seal careers when they received a briefing on the USS San Francisco , a nuclear-powered submarine that crashed into an undersea mountain, in large part due to uncharted waters. Joe Wolfel (left) and Judson Kauffman [Photo: courtesy of Terradepth] “The Navy really doesn’t have charts or maps of very much of the seafloor at all,” Kauffman says. Even now, 80% of the ocean remains unmapped, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . “That was the first time that either one of us understood the level of ignorance that exists around this subsea world, so that kind of planted a seed.” Still, their scheme for hurdling that challenge wouldn’t germinate for another dozen years, after the pair parlayed their military experience into a business consultancy and began noting the burgeoning array of space exploration robotics. “One day we looked at each other and said, ‘Why isn’t anybody taking this technology—autonomy, AI, and machine learning—and finding a way to map the ocean?’ ” Kauffman says. “There’s a whole lot of room for modern technology to come in and disrupt the world of ocean exploration and the industry of ocean surveys.” [Image: courtesy of Terradepth] That vision has since blossomed into Austin-based Terradepth , a data service company that has developed a new type of robotic submarine to autonomously map the ocean and its varied environments. [Photo: courtesy of Terradepth] The 30-foot-long submersible uses a camera and sensor suite to collect data, then employs machine learning to process it, discern what’s important, and reprogram itself to return to a location and test for additional information—all without human intervention. The system relies on edge computing, which can analyze information and solve problems at the data source in near real time. The team successfully ran the submarine through its first on-site paces in nearby Lake Travis earlier this month, paving the way for more robust testing in the Gulf of Mexico within three weeks and the Florida coast after that. Along with a camera, the submarine utilizes two types of sonar as well as depth, navigational, temperature, and geolocation instruments. It can dive to nearly 20,000 feet, the depth of 98% of the ocean Read More …

17 moments in the long, turbulent history of vaccine skepticism

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . Quick—when did the epidemic of misinformation about vaccines begin? Was it when Jenny McCarthy took to The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 to claim that a vaccine caused her son’s autism? Or maybe when the anti-vax movement discovered that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were a powerful way to amp their message and recruit new members to the cause? Try a little earlier than that—by more than two centuries. Shortly after Edward Jenner pioneered vaccination at the end of the 1700s, the movement against it began. Even earlier, vaccination’s precursor—known at the time as inoculation or variolation—inspired similar fear and misconceptions. Some of the specific arguments made against vaccines have evolved over the years. The means used to amplify them—from pamphlets to online videos—have changed even more. Read More …

Writers who crave independence should skip Substack—and do this instead

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Let me start by saying that I appreciate what Substack is trying to do for journalism. The promise of the hosted publishing platform is that anyone can start a subscription-based publication—primarily as a newsletter—without having to worry about building a website, setting up a membership system, and fussing with design. Just put good words in, and if your audience is devoted enough, money will come out. For a growing number of writers, it’s a welcome reprieve from feeding the algorithms of Google, Facebook, and Twitter—and a chance to make some decent money along the way. But one thing I’ve realized in nearly five years of publishing my own independent newsletters is that doing things the hard way has its own rewards, from keeping more of the money to maintaining a stronger sense of independence. As more writers start building up their own newsletter businesses, I suspect a lot of them will discover this for themselves. Starting from scratch If we’re being honest, I probably would have jumped on board with Substack myself if it had been available when I started writing a newsletter about cord-cutting in 2016. Nearly every newsletter service back then was focused on email marketing instead of editorial writing, and they all charged high prices if your mailing list grew too large. As I started to outgrow Mailchimp’s 2,000-subscriber limit for free users, self-hosting seemed like the only option that didn’t cost upward of $30 per month. (Mailchimp did have its own writer-friendly service called Tinyletter , but it, too, had a 5,000-subscriber limit Read More …