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OnlyFans: What Is It and How Is It Changing the SW Industry

OnlyFans has become one of the most widely known NSFW social media platform in the past few years. While there has also been recent controversy surrounding Bella Thorne’s use of the platform, a lot of people don’t know just exactly what OnlyFans is. The platform has been around for less than a decade but has had quite the influence on the porn industry: 

“Founded in 2016 by Tim Stokely—an entrepreneur who first created a bondage and fetish site in 2011 that allowed people to pay porn performers for custom content—OnlyFans allows content creators to post content and receive payments directly from “fans” via monthly subscriptions or one-time tips.” (fightthenewdrug

Ultimately, OnlyFans is like an extension of Instagram- in which a user can place a paywall between their content and their auidence. Followers pay a fee to creators they subscribe too. The fee can range from $4.99 to $49.99 per month, along with a minimum of $5 tips or paid private messaging. For creators on the app, “OnlyFans takes a 20 percent cut of creator’s earnings and claims to only share users’ personal information to third-party payment processing companies for ‘verification purposes’.” (fightthenewdrug) In this sense, the platform provides opportunity for a lot of creators to earn steady revenue if they produce content. A lot of influencers use OnlyFans to extend their social media accounts, most notably Instagram and Twitter. Twitter is one of the most NSFW friendly social medial platforms in terms of visibility and a lot of OnlyFans creators promote their content on Twitter as a result. OnlyFans has digitized sex work and in turn has laregely imacted the SW industry. 

OnlyFans & Sex Work

OnlyFans found its way into the lives of mainstream social media users during the COVID-19 pandemic. “OnlyFans reported 3.5 million new signups in March—that’s a 75% increase, or around 150,000 new users every 24 hours.” (fightthenewdrug) A lot of social media influencers found themselves stuck at home with no resources to travel and continue producing content. In this sense, OF symbolized a new opportunity for follower engagement and growth for influencers who were stuck at home and needed a new niche. OF is not just home to social media influencers who want to extend their online profile though, “Experience levels vary from creator to creator. Some are commercial sex industry professionals who were in the industry long before the platform existed and have expanded their services and supplemented their income through OnlyFans, while others had little to no commercial sex experience prior to the lockdowns.”(fightthenewdrug) The website “ Fight the New Drug” wrote an article that I’ve been citing that spoke on some controversy surrounding the impact of the SW industry on social media influencers. The article is concerned that social media influencers may be harmed by the SW industry due to the NSFW nature of the content produced on the app. The article discusses some valid issues that OnlyFans has brought into the sex industry, such as the increase of underage individuals producing and selling content. Its the truth:

“Many OnlyFans creators use Twitter to advertise selling nudes and drive traffic to their profiles—particularly through trending hashtags like #teen and #barelylegal. And while they’re clearly are underage creators on OnlyFans, on the flip side, many adult creators give the illusion of being under 18 to grow their fan base.” (fightthenewdrug

This is one of the main negative impacts that OF has had on the online SW industry and it’s something that definitely needs to be more actively addressed by the platform.

While OF poses some negative threats to the SW industry, it also poses some positive growth opportunities as well. The platform has granted a lot of sex workers the freedom to create their own protected pornographic content without being chained to a particular production studio. Rain DeGrey, a SW on OF, spoke on the impact that OF has had on the SW industry during the pandemic in an article for Elle: “Circumventing the use of old fashioned narrative pornography studios has also been a boon to creators who are grateful for the site’s bolstered security and anti-piracy measures. ‘OnlyFans is the wave of the future because it is so much harder to steal the content...With the industry a shell of itself and now the pandemic on top of it, studios are just not creating like they used to.’ But OnlyFans, she says, is ‘the farmer’s market of porn. The creator is selling directly to the consumer.’” (elle) OnlyFans has allowed the SW industry to continue to expand during the pandemic and it has provided a lot of individuals with a steady source of income during this time of uncertainty. 

Overall, OF is a great platform for those looking to extend their social media personalities into the world of SW. However, the downside of such a platform is that individuals are not always serious when they join and do not represent the SW community in an authentic way. With this being said, I feel it’s appropriate to end this blog with a tweet from a fellow OF creator, twitter user @frankiebunnie.

“Dear other [people] reading this: odds are you are not internet famous. you will not make six figures in your first year doing sex work. you will not retain your first subscribers throughout the year. research sex work for months before you do it. it is not easy money!!!” (elle

Sex work is legitimate work and it is not easy. While platforms such as OF do make the SW industry more accessible to creators that does not mean it’s a simple process to actually gain a profit. OnlyFans has the potential to be a great tool in the sex worker’s tool box if you use it wisely! 

By: Alyssa Morterud