Andrew Cedotal writes to me:
This issue came up with a post where someone said that N% of Americans are OnlyFans content creators, here it is again!
With software services, the total accounts once created is a null metric. It is not used by serious operators or investors of consumer technology companies (the fact that it appears in public financial reports so often has interesting consequences).
The social impact/business value of a software service is about flow (eg monthly active users and monthly revenue), not stock. 100 real person registrations means more, less real monthly active users (MAU) at any given time, because users are opting out. Even the best retention services around (eg Snap) only have 90% retention per year, which then goes down.
Then there is the problem that in any public software service, many accounts are bots, rownaways, people who have forgotten their password, etc.
Rather than make a really wild guess, let’s look at the threshold based on a report of $6.6B in total payments made by users in 2023 (so the average revenue / month is $0.55B). All of the following are possible borderline points for paying MAU (monthly paid active users) versus monthly APPPU (monthly payments per paying user):
* 10 million paying MAU, $55 monthly APPPU
* 30 million paying MAU, monthly APPPU of $18.33
* 50 million paying MAU, $11 monthly APPPU
* 100 million paying MAU, $5.5 monthly APPPU(The industry standard is to look at ARPPU–average revenue per paying user–not average payouts, but I think here we are more interested in determining how much users put in and we can ignore the take rate of the platform, not the financial analysis of the Company.)
Now, OnlyFans may have ~300M total subscribers, but let’s assume that half of those are dupes and bots. So 150M is the actual registration of a person. It is unlikely that more than 20% of people who have ever opened an account have ever applied for a credit card, so that is 300 * 0.5 * .2 = 30M as a break from people who have ever paid. Consider userbase churn, and guesswork is ~12M monthly paying accounts right now (0.15% of the population, not 4%), which would put them at $45.83 monthly APPPU or ~$550 annual APPPU . About the annual cost of a gym membership in the US
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