I never subscribed, was I missing out on anything?

they removed all their adult content and lost 50% of their web traffic overnight.

I mean, what where they thinking? It's a porn site that decided to stop allowing porn on the site. That is a surefire way to kill your business.

They were thinking the same thing Tumblr was thinking when Tumblr deleted most of its adult content. "What can I do to alienate my target market and ruin my customer base?"

They were forced into it by conservative financial companies (specifically VISA and MASTERCARD) that doesn't like people getting off. Even though they do age verification and all that stuff, the payment processing companies threatened to pull their methods (currently THE most common) if they didn't pull the content.