Creator Payments on Solana
Summary
- The creator membership space is growing rapidly with over US$10B in user spending in 2022.
- Creator agencies are the key drivers in this industry. The main problems they face are payout failures and low-trust between agencies and creators — both can only be solved at a consumer scale using Solana
- Through working with creators and their agencies, Only1 is developing trustless payment solutions using Solana as settlement layer.
- The Only1 community will share upside of platform growth through LIKE token buyback and burn.
- Many exciting features will soon be released as we onboard creators, roadmap will be annouced next 1–2 weeks.
OnlyFans — Leader in creator payments
OnlyFans is a subscription platform launched in 2016 to let fans gain exclusive access to creator content. The creator membership sector has over US$10B in user spending in 2022 from platforms like OnlyFans, Patreon, Fansly, Buy-me-a-Coffee, and Fancentro. According to OnlyFans’ annual report filing, their earnings in 2022 were up 16% with total user spending of US$5.6B from roughly 238M fans and 3.2M creators. The platform’s majority owner, Leonid Radvinsky received US$338M in dividents for the 2022 fiscal year. These traction are super impressive across any sector especially during this market condition.
How did they do this?
OnlyFans Growth — Agencies
Nearly all top 1% OnlyFans creator we talk to work with marketing agencies called OFMs (OnlyFans Managers) to drive traffic to the subscription site. OFMs help creators curate content and promote their pages on social media like Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. In this context, OnlyFans did not grow to this scale by marketing to the fans, but rather developing the features that allow creators and managers to best operate and monetise.
However, there are problems that creators and OFMs face — payments.
Creator Payment Problems
We at Only1 operate our own creator agency service to help creator scale their social media presence. We also work closely with several OFMs and their creators. Here are some problems that nearly all of them face:
Low-trust between creators and OFMs
Creators and OFMs usually have contracts for earnings split, so one of the two parties will always receive the earnings first to distribute the split to the other. Many creators and managers therefore will not work together unless they are in the same city or know each other personally. This low-trust environment for the matching of creators and agencies prevents many creators from increasing their profits.
💡 What if there was a trust-less way for fund split through smart contracts?
Payout failures
Creators depend on membership sites such as OnlyFans for their livelihood, yet payout failure happens frequently. In 2021, Mastercard requested OnlyFans to ban explicit content. In 2023, Patreon had major payment collapse resulting in creators losing their subscribers and are unable to receive payout. Fansify (previously Pocketstar) still owes many creators payouts and are unclear if they will ever receive it.
💡 What if payment rails are decentralised, and users receive their payments directly into their own digital wallets?
Only1 — Solution to creator payments
Only1 is the first membership platform for creators that uses the Solana blockchain as the payment settlement layer. By using a decentralised payment rail, we are able to offer creators reliable payouts with better fees while creating a trust-less environment for creators to work with their managers to boost their earnings. Besides basic features such as web3 messenger, subscription, Passes (similar to Keys in Friendtech), posts, and discovery, below are other highlights of our benefits.
Multi-sig fund management for creators and managers
Creators can delegate part of their earning percentage to a different wallet with a time limit. For example, Joey delegates 30% of her earnings to her manager Bob for 6 months. Once Bob accepts the split, the only way to change this setting is if both wallets signs on the adjustments. Similar to how AirBnb created trust between hosts and travellers to faciliate more stays, this multi-sig feature will create more matches between creators and agencies.
Decentralised payments
Every payment from messenger tips to memberships are paid directly P2P (peer-to-peer) to user owned non-custodial wallets. This means creators will always instantly receive their payments regardless of the platform status. No entity can block user from receiving their funds so non-payment issues will never occur. Due to the potential volume of such microtransactions, Solana is the only blockchain where this can be executed on consumer scale.
Community ownership & LIKE buybacks
As a decentralised membership platform, the community are able to earn LIKE and participate in platform governance and receive upside of platform growth. Only1 use portion of platform fee to buyback LIKE to burn (remove from circulation permanently) and distribute to users as reward. Read more on tokenomics here.
What’s next
The Only1 platform is still an early product but has already seen 5x growth in monthly active user in the past 3 months. We work closely with top creator agencies to better the platform with many feature releases in the pipeline. The development roadmap will be released in next 1–2 weeks. Stay updated by following our socials in the links below.
