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All right so I've realized that it's 20 Years now, as of last October 2025
Instead of writing a new post - Let me just bump this one.
So what I can remember that we've seen since 2016:
The mobile gold-rush faded with more regulations, the Wild West shut down basically over night, those that actually made money and were smart kept them, or at least a major part of it.
We've seen an immense growth in the fan page OnlyFans type of business.
Leo Radvinski (Rest in peace and peace for his family) buying himself in and officially dominating yet another most profitable market segment, at exactly the right time.
With many OF clones come and go, some that had solid backing remained online, some that were sold, some that disappeared, and some that remained live and profitable or semi-profitable. A large part of the traffic volume the fan site creators make fueled by social media promotion, with more and more strategies implemented to scale and, often quite successfully, to avoid the ban hammer, at least for as long as possible.
We've seen the fan site management agencies implementing chatters, and various legit and often not all that legit traffic acquisition techniques in order to boost and scale their earnings.
Live Cams have been doing well, especially those that didn't rest on their laurels and worked their product in order to improve the user experience utilising some cutting edge technology, and pattern recognition techniques.
Both massively boosted by the infamous 2020 - 22 lockdowns, keeping the spenders at home and getting new at home spenders hooked along the way.
With both these segments having in common interaction, custom content, personality + micro payments and custom pay per content structure, that's stimulating impulse spending. The same as in a casino, there's little to no limit how much can one spend if he feels the urge to do so. And it often ends up as somewhat more than planned.
The trade shows crowd became more visually interesting, with business savvy creators and their promoters looking for fan traffic opportunities.
At the same time - there's a Major storm of billing and age verification related regulations that soon affect more than what most originally expected.
Many dating companies losing their processing or having to put an extensive effort into migrating and adjusting their billing and product requirements, in order to comply or semi-comply with the ever more complex regulations.
And now also with the big sites over a certain threshold being forced to implement age verification, which in turns means that they can easily lose around 90 % of their traffic. As those 90 % may simply flee to a competitor site, where they don't need to age-verify.
Fast forward to 2023 - to the age of Artificial Intelligence.
All sorts of automation, data processing and pattern recognition systems all of a sudden getting a new supercharged engine. Early adopters being able to serve content at a level and scale that wasn't feasibly realisable before.
The rise of AI content creation (and semi-creation / duplication) presenting a major opportunity, with many fascinated by the idea of being able to create content that could drive sales, without actually having the typical production or licensing costs, apart from the setup and tech related infrastructure. This has been advancing rapidly, with new and better / more suitable content generation models being introduced every couple of months.
Sparking also a large amount of, mostly unanswered questions, regarding copyrights and regulation in general.
Recently experiencing an outbreak of AI companion websites and APPS and their clones, and clones of their clones. Many of which appear to be fuelled by third party (non-industry) investment.
While the AI enabled to automate / outsource some of the tedious tasks that one may need to deal with in a day to day business. It also may be at a brink of an AI created content overload - check several unrelated entities, their social media or blog content, and if you're only a slightly more intermediate user, you'll find patterns.
All and all - the consolidation and over-regulation of the market may be a drag, especially for those who still experienced the heydays. But the AI era also poses exciting opportunities and threats alike.
The key is and will be to find a way to take advantage of this, and land on the right side of the equation.
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