The Price of Intimate Image Abuse
Investing in the taboo means being exposed to the subjects that many people find uncomfortable, but are deeply important. We are not only here to invest, but to use our platform to discuss these topics openly. The following is a guest piece from Marin Scarlett at Image Angel.
The modern internet was built on an economic marvel: scaling at near-zero cost. Distributing software, media, or data to ten million users costs virtually the same as distributing it to just ten. This has created enormous, unprecedented revenue and built a huge part of the modern economy.
But seamless reproduction and distribution has come at a price. When applied to intimate images without consent, these same mechanisms have produced devastating consequences: the easy, mass sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery.
NCII and its distribution is often framed as an interpersonal or domestic dispute, or a moral failing. For investors and technologists, it should also be recognised as a market failure. Platforms capture the financial upside of engagement, ad impressions, and subscription rake, while catastrophic costs are offloaded onto society.
The Hidden Cost: Who Really Pays?
We rarely grapple with the scale of the problem. Government and academic research indicate that in the UK, one in seven young women and one in nine young men have faced threats of intimate image sharing. Among digital content creators and sex workers, that figure of those actually experiencing non-consensual intimate image sharing surges to nearly one in three.
Yet the economic burden of this crisis has not historically registered on company balance sheets. The immediate financial damage is to the victim, through lost earnings, legal battles, reputational damage and repair, and mental health support. NGOs like the UK's Revenge Porn Helpline operate as de facto, publicly funded repair workers for companies, manually processing takedowns and providing victim support on shoestring budgets. Meanwhile, law enforcement invests already limited time and resources into attempting to trace abusers, often fruitlessly, without sufficient funding and understanding of the issue.
Meanwhile, platforms treat intimate image abuse as simply the cost of doing business, and protections for their users as an optional, discretionary cost that can be overlooked.
Up until now, the industry has relied on reactive moderation, with technologies like perceptual hash matching (comparing content against central databases of known illicit files). This approach was already imperfect, with content only hashed after it had been leaked, distributed or reported. The rise of generative AI completely destroys it. Diffusion models, nudification tools and deepfakes generate unique images that hash matching cannot recognise.
Regulatory Enforcement Has Arrived
History shows that industries do not do better out of goodwill. They do so only when forced by law, and by liability for non-compliance. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandated the use of proper audit software to tackle fraud, or GDPR laws, which forced companies to take users' rights over their personal data seriously.
The same structural shift is now hitting platform safety, through the Online Safety Act in the UK, Europe's Digital Services Act, and evolving US state legislation. When regulatory bodies like Ofcom have the power to mandate automated prevention and issue enormous fines (up to £18 million or 10% of a company's annual global revenue, whichever is higher), safety stops being purely about optics.
As compliance becomes financially essential, companies will be required to invest in the infrastructure to ensure it. And this is where the opportunity for investors sits.
Image Angel's watermarking technology tackles the problem of non-consensual intimate image sharing at the source. By embedding invisible, forensic-grade watermarks tied to individual user sessions, any content downloaded, screenshotted or scraped carries a unique digital marker. If media “leaks”, the forensic technology survives significant editing and compression, attributing the abuse directly to the originating account.
While investors have historically hesitated around creator and intimate media platforms, that narrative is becoming outdated. Institutional capital is already moving, with Architect Capital's landmark $535 million acquisition of a 16% stake in OnlyFans' parent company, Fenix International, backed by high-profile investors that include Sam Lessin and James Packer. These platforms represent billions in transaction revenue, and potential investors should start to look at an enormous opportunity.
As regulation makes safety architecture mandatory, the infrastructure that protects content creators and service users and holds abusers to account will become foundational to online platforms. The enormous potential returns will belong to the early movers willing to look past stigma and fund companies like Image Angel that have developed the tools to enforce online safety.
In August and September this year, Image Angel tech has been used to identify 23 perpetrators on one platform alone. That's 23 fewer bad actors on the platform, many of whom were repeat perpetrators with multiple incidents of image abuse. This is working infrastructure, transforming platforms to be compliant with new regulation. Smart capital is getting behind it.