---
title: Sin site strategies
description: What news publishing can learn from adult and gambling sites
---

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# Sin site strategies

[Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter)  15 August 2025

 4 min read

**What news publishing can learn from adult and gambling sites**

I laughed out loud the other day while walking my dog and listening to a podcast. It wasn’t a comedy pod but rather People v Algorithms, which delves into the intersection of media, politics and power.

What made me laugh? The assertion from one of the contributors, known as the Anonymous Banker, that Substack needs to become more like OnlyFans to live up to its new sky-high valuation.

The idea was that Substack needs to develop closer relationships – ”build intimacy” – between its creators and subscribers. This was OnlyFans’ trick, he said: “Even if it’s people pretending to be the girls responding, the users are getting this increased level of intimacy that they can’t get anywhere else and then that opens their wallet up to spend more money.”

It was an observation delivered completely deadpan. The presenters joked about OnlyFans being like Bloomberg terminals because for both messaging is the real killer app. But the Anonymous Banker was being deadly serious.

I reflected that we can be quite squeamish about the adult industry, often for good reasons, but also that we should acknowledge that sometimes there are things to learn from it.

And lo, just a few days later, when I asked Michael, my business partner, to write about how publishers could reduce churn in response to a subscriber request, he proposed writing about what they could learn from the retention strategies of the gambling and adult industries.

Great idea, I said, because having spoken to a friend in the gambling industry I knew quite how sophisticated they were.

Michael knows lots more about this, professionally speaking, and his piece about the [seven things publishers can learn from the adult and gambling industries](https://tomorrowspublisher.today/editors-picks/seven-things-publishers-can-learn-from-the-adult-and-gambling-industries/) is both informative and useful – and deadly serious. He mustered all his strength to resist the temptation for innuendo and sniggering.

I think there is a wider point here too. The news industry has not been great at learning from other industries or in bringing in outside expertise. Some of my best hires have been non-journalists – their different point of views more than made up for their lack of formal journalistic training – and yet still I had to fight off newsroom voices who said: “But they’re not journalists.”

I’d hope that given where we are in 2025 that those attitudes have been put firmly in a box with a label saying “The Past”. The question now is how to incorporate these outside talents and their ideas as quickly as possible.

## Next blog post

<https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/ice-warning>

## [Ice warning](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/ice-warning)

[Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/ice-warning)

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