Gumroad no longer allows most NSFW art, leaving its adult creators panicked

51 points by rahidz 1 year ago | 58 comments
  • falcolas 1 year ago
    I'm sure this will end well for them. I guess if you go out of business, you don't have to worry about running afoul of your choice of payment provider's requirements.

    So far as I know, Gumroad is basically the artists' OF. Without porn, what will they really have left?

    • gjsman-1000 1 year ago
      Reminder that NSFW content has disproportionate amounts of fraud and chargebacks. This is also why Stripe, PayPal, Visa, etc. hate it just from a business perspective.
      • PedroBatista 1 year ago
        That's "common knowledge" but I wonder how true that is.

        I have a feeling NSFW attracts more problems from a "moral", political and pressure groups perspective than actual fraud and that's the main reason companies don't want to touch it.

        • gjsman-1000 1 year ago
          The rate depends, but take OnlyFans: They cascade (I.e. spread out) payments across at least 3 providers, and automatically rotate between them to avoid any of them getting a rate too high.

          Seems like quite a bit of logistics if it was not really an issue.

          • 1 year ago
          • falcolas 1 year ago
            I know. But I also know that if NSFW content makes up the majority of your store and/or sales, it behooves you to find a payment processor who accepts that risk (albeit at a higher cost).
            • moooo99 1 year ago
              Funnily enough, I bought lots of stuff on GumRoad and wasn’t aware that NSFW is huge there. I only knew it as the platform for online courses, ebooks and mediocre notion templates
              • latency-guy2 1 year ago
                Then the artist can take on the risk by establishing their own business and finding a payment processor who accepts that risk instead. Will they? Won't they?
              • zajio1am 1 year ago
                So why not offer payment methods without chargebacks? Here in Europe, i pay 95% online payments with direct bank transfers, which do not offer chargebacks.
                • gjsman-1000 1 year ago
                  Because in America, direct bank payments are a pain, and come with the risk of more money being taken out than displayed onscreen. Your bank account information might also get re-used.

                  There’s a reason why it’s common advice to use credit cards and not debit cards, simply because the fraud protections and laws are stronger.

            • jzig 1 year ago
              Aren’t there payment processors that allow adult content? Makes me wonder why a platform like Gumroad couldn’t just use a different processor for customers that mark themselves as NSFW.
              • Zambyte 1 year ago
                As much as people love to hate it: crypto
                • tazu 1 year ago
                  I wish there was an easy way to handle subscriptions with crypto. Like if MetaMask or other wallet apps agreed on a "pull-based" billing system. That would probably never happen, but I can dream.

                  As an operator, I'd also want a smart contract that collects payments from a list of tokens/altcoins and immediately converts it to USDC.

                  • Zambyte 1 year ago
                    You can do that by making a smart contract that the payee can only pull X amount from on certain block intervals, and the payer can deposit and withdraw from a often as they like. It would essentially be a checking account.

                    Also re: auto converting tokens - you can jusr make a service to do that, it doesn't have to be a smart contract. A smart contract probably could be used with a DEX though, but I think that may be needlessly complex.

                  • technofiend 1 year ago
                    Specifically Monero. No evidence for Puritans or data-mining companies to try and shame you or make you pay to forget.
                    • colesantiago 1 year ago
                      absolutely not the solution.
                      • firejake308 1 year ago
                        I don't see why not though? One of the benefits of a decentralized currency is that it is not subject to censorship by any central authority who disagrees with the content you are purchasing. That is exactly the problem these guys are having. Granted, they'll have to pay a lot of transaction fees/gas, and the volatility still makes it hard to fix prices, but for one-off transactions, you can ignore day-to-day volatility as long as the minute-to-minite volatility is bearable.
                        • Zambyte 1 year ago
                          I didn't say it was "the" solution, but it absolutely is a solution to what they asked.
                          • tslocum 1 year ago
                            Why? To me, it seems like a clear solution, and is actually one of the core goals of the creation of cryptocurrency.
                        • klint 1 year ago
                          Yep. CCBill is one the bigger/better known in that space. I’m guessing Gumroad just doesn’t think it’s worth it.
                          • porkbeer 1 year ago
                            Cash. Crypto is now, but will be regulated into submission, or out of existance.
                            • tennisflyi 1 year ago
                              As mentioned CCBil. Another is Epoch and SegPay. Most are found in the footer for pay sites.
                            • Freak_NL 1 year ago
                              > “We have been asked to be more rigorous in enforcing our ToS and must comply,” Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia told TechCrunch. He declined to say which company asked Gumroad to enforce stricter rules.

                              This refusal to even name which payment provider is being an ass irks me, and makes me worry that this may just be a convenient excuse to get rid of adult content 'because the payment providers made me do it'.

                              Gumroad already was hostile to adult content by forcing anyone looking for sex-related content (regardless of its type) to repeat every search by explicitly ticking the 'Show NSFW' checkbox way down the bottom of the filter list, and have to repeat this for every search, with no way of opting in in the settings.

                              • danShumway 1 year ago
                                > “Should Gumroad hire a lobbyist?” he asked in an email to TechCrunch.

                                Yes? I'm a little confused as to why platforms that feature adult material wouldn't be lobbying around payment processing requirements and regulations. I don't know much about the porn industry, but are there seriously not lobbyists in that industry?

                                OnlyFans got (effectively) banned from multiple states. They absolutely have a legal team and a PR team that's focused on the government. How would any platform that features adult content not be looking at OnlyFans and thinking, "maybe we should start prepping for legal/regulatory battles."?

                                I mean, heck, how are they not "lobbying" payment processors? TikTok basically unleashed its entire userbase on the government over a potential ban. When a payment processor starts messing with the content you can allow on a storefront, is there a reason why Gumroad isn't making contact information available for those payment processors and encouraging users to write to them? I'm sure it wouldn't help Stripe's relationship with Gumroad be any more chummy, but like... this is a business relationship, not a friendship. I don't know, these platforms act like they just got an edict from God rather than that they are being pressured by a business partner to make a business decision that their userbase dislikes. Am I out-of-line on this? I feel like when business agreements get restricted and that affects customers, it's relatively common for businesses to use that discontent as leverage in negotiations and not just say, "well, hands are tied, sorry everybody." When Sony restricted Spiderman, Disney was not shy about encouraging people to contact Sony.

                                I guess I assume there are complications with business relationships with payment processors that makes that harder? I don't know if there are any payment processors that do work with adult content, maybe Gumroad just knows that it doesn't have any bargaining chips to work with?

                                But I kind of get whiplash between looking at how companies respond to things like iOS restrictions vs how they respond to payment processing restrictions. I would have assumed that these types of businesses were already lobbying, everybody else seems to be. Maybe Gumroad is too small to have those kinds of legal resources? Is Patreon working with lobbyists? Is Kickstarter?