In the aftermath of itch.io pulling the sale of over 20,000 pages of adult content, the creators of that work are left feeling betrayed, exhausted, and fearful. The number of platforms that permit the sale of adult material is shrinking, and there’s no guarantee the ones that remain will still permit it in the future. But now, with their livelihoods at stake, many creators and their communities have begun to push back and search for new ways to thrive.
“Before [itch.io], the NSFW comics community would grouse and complain and share feelings of anxiety,” said Brad Guigar, a smut comic artist. “This time around, we’re actually doing something about it.”
For some, that means organizing massive call campaigns to pressure payment processors to reverse course and allow itch.io to host the content it had before. Others have decided to abandon the fickleness of platforms for their own websites. And yet others have decided that if they can’t sell their game directly, they’ll just make it free.
To some creators, the most disheartening thing about itch.io removing thousands of pages of adult content is that it’s relatively unsurprising. The storefront is one of several in recent years that have embraced adult content only to shun it later when payment processors start asking questions. They’ve now found themselves booted from platform to platform, moving from Tumblr to Patreon to Gumroad, only to have the rug pulled out from under them each time.
“This time around, we’re actually doing something about it.”
When adult creators are regularly forced to find new places for their work, their business overall suffers. “I can never get ahead,” said PixelJail, a creator who makes BDSM and other kink-related comics and illustrations. “I have to stop doing paid work to set up new accounts, backlog posting, pay for new subscriptions or services” and other administrative tasks.
PixelJail has now opted to set up their own websites. But even without the burden of conforming to a platform’s rules, having one’s own website isn’t a guarantee of absolute safety. In the UK, where PixelJail lives, the recently implemented Online Safety Act requires that online platforms have “strong age checks” in place to prevent children from accessing pornographic or “harmful” content.
“I had to geoblock my websites in the UK, including my webstore,” PixelJail said, meaning they no longer sell their work in their own country.
Laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act are slowly proliferating across the United States. The US Supreme Court recently ruled that age verification laws do not violate the First Amendment and many states are now requiring adult content sites to implement age verification tools, which can be expensive and subject to privacy concerns. Rather than comply, sites like PornHub have simply decided to cease operations in areas where those laws are in effect. Individual creators might have to make a similar choice.
“I made my site years ago and didn’t use it much at first,” PixelJail said. “But it’s gradually become the only real place I can go to sell and even now, that’s at risk.”
Gif: Cathryn Hutton / The Verge
Creator platforms have repeatedly been forced to exile adult content creators. In 2017, Patreon tightened its rules related to adult content causing some of those creators to abandon the site with man choosing to set up shop with Gumroad, another e-commerce platform. Then, last year, Gumroad banned virtually all sexually explicit material, causing yet another adult creator mass migration. You can follow the line of adult creators hopping from platform to platform fleeing content bans all the way back to one website: Tumblr.
“From between 2012 to 2018, there was a huge, and I truly do mean huge NSFW community on Tumblr,” said DieselBrain, a smut artist specializing in monster kink. For many of the creators I spoke to, the “Tumblr Purge” of 2018, where the social media site outright banned all adult content, was their first experience with having their previously accepted work suddenly prohibited. “This kicked the entire community off of there, and I’d argue that we never really recovered fully,” Dieselbrain said.
It’s easy to see how. When porn creators move from one platform to another they bring their communities with them creating an influx of traffic that would please any website. Then, after reaping the benefits of all those new eyeballs (in addition to a portion of the transactions those new eyeballs make), sites dispose of the reason for its newfound success.
This was almost the case with OnlyFans, which, in 2020, briefly flirted with banning adult content, the kind of material the website was universally known for. In every case, payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard were the culprit for these crackdowns. While all payment processors have guidelines prohibiting the sale of illegal material, many host platforms overcorrect, banning material that would ostensibly be permitted in order to avoid the increased scrutiny (and cost) hosting that content requires.
“We have been asked to be more rigorous in enforcing our ToS and must comply,” Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia said in an interview with TechCrunch regarding its ban of adult content. Lavingia declined to name the specific company asking.
To blunt the blow caused by platform disruption, creators often turn to their communities, both the ones made up of other creators, or those made up of their personal fans. They act as information networks, sharing news about where a creator may have set up shop and are more generally an avenue of commiseration and support. To help his fellow artists navigate the recent events with itch.io, Guigar, the NSFW artist, started a newsletter for adult creators called Uncensored Artists.
The developer Cara Cadaver is leveraging her community to help support her game VILE: Exhumed. She made the game available for free on the Internet Archive after it was banned from Steam, which, according to her, was done under false pretenses.
“There are a lot of intense visuals in VILE: Exhumed,” Cara Cadaver wrote. “But there is no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography whatsoever – which is one of the justifications bad actors are using right now to censor games.”
Though the game is free, there are options to support Cadaver directly through donations, half of which, she said, will be donated to charity. “This censorship of my work is a direct attack on creative expression and artistic freedom, and it will not stop with false accusations of sexual content,” Cadaver said.
There has virtually never been a stable time to be an adult creator on the internet. To them, it feels unfair to have come to places like Tumblr, Patreon, Gumroad, and now itch.io, places that were tolerant of the kinds of work they did, only to have those places taken away, often without warning or recourse, leaving them with one less way to make a living.
“Most of the creators I know are everyday people with bills to pay mired in late stage capitalism,” said Mesmereye, an artist who specializes in hypnosis kink. “When you have a body, a camera, and an internet connection, why shouldn’t you try to put the proverbial bread on the table with the assets and talents you’re born with?”
