OnlyFans is an online platform where so-called ‘content creators’ can share ‘content’ and chat with paying customers (fans). In theory it is a safe and secure platform for sharing any kind of content, but in practice it is sexualised content and pornography, because this is what subscribers demand and are willing to pay for. There is considerable documented abuse and crime happening on the platform, including child sexual abuse and the pimping of women by third parties, of whom Andrew Tate is one of the best known because of his self-promotion.
OnlyFans has lowered the bar to entry into the world of selling pornographic videos of yourself online: setting up as a creator on OnlyFans is only a small leap from running an Instagram account.
Popular myths suggest that OnlyFans is a harmless, easy way to make lots of money, that it can be sexually empowering for women, and that women can easily maintain control of their content. These myths lure women into setting up an account, only for them to discover when it is too late that the reality is somewhat different.
Most creators don’t make much money
While the top accounts make upwards of millions a year, the vast majority make very little. On average, creators earn as little as $150 (£112) to $180 (£134) a month. Not enough to live on in the UK and barely enough to even cover a basic diet. This is not what all the hype in the media would have you believe.
After investing in equipment (e.g. a quality webcam, microphone, and lighting kit) and huge amounts of time, many creators realise they are making almost nothing. Having taken their clothes off for random strangers on the internet, at this point some women might think about turning to ‘full service’ prostitution – which comes with an additional raft of dangers. It is common for fans to offer to pay substantial sums to meet in person for sex and as time goes on and creators become increasingly desperate for money, it can become virtually impossible to refuse.
OnlyFans takes 20% commission of creators’ earnings – a much smaller cut than the 50-65% that the older webcamming sites typically take. This lower commission is part of the popularity of OnlyFans. However, it comes with a major drawback – unlike the older webcamming sites, OnlyFans does nothing to promote creators or to send traffic to their content. Creators are on their own and have to engage in constant self-promotion to attract and retain paying fans.
The hustle
Unless creators already have celebrity status and/or bring a large following from Instagram or similar to OnlyFans, takings are likely to be slim. But bringing followers from a personal Instagram account has real dangers – of stalking, of future employers, colleagues and potential partners identifying you, and so on. The Revenge Porn Helpline advises being anonymous and using separate devices and accounts for all personal and sex industry activities.
To achieve a following and make more than a pittance, most creators have to invest large amounts of time in promotion. One woman describes it like this:
“I learned quickly that the only way to make money on OnlyFans when you don’t have an established following on other social media is to promote constantly. That means dragging yourself to the internet’s hell where men who would pay to see your bikini-clad body might sit: sex-related Reddit and Twitter threads.”
The chances are high that you could make more money per hour stacking shelves in a supermarket.
The desperation and need to make money and the fact that each creator is in competition with the approximately four million other OnlyFans creators, along with all the other porn on the internet, means there is pressure to provide ever more sexualised and degrading content. So while a young woman might start with the intention of just posting scantily clad images, the logic of the platform is such that she is soon likely to be posting highly explicit and degrading pornographic videos of herself.
Promoting content typically means sharing short clips of this content on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, on community platforms like Reddit, and on dating sites. OnlyFans operates fairly robust age verification which, while not failsafe, does keep the content on its platform away from most under 18s. However, this does not apply to many of the platforms where creators promote their content, particularly social media sites that are used extensively by children. This and the rapid expansion of OnlyFans since the start of the Covid lockdowns has resulted in a colossal increase in the amount of porn that children are exposed to.
Competition and the battle for the attention and subscriptions of fans is leading women to do ever more extreme stunts. For example, Lily Phillips had sex with 100 men in one day and Bonnie Blue allegedly had sex with more than 1000 men shortly afterwards. All of this was filmed with the aim of releasing it and attracting more fans, attention and income. This then becomes the bar by which fans will come to measure all other creators – which begs the question of where it will end.
OnlyFans creators can earn a percentage of the earnings of new creators they introduce (‘refer’) to the site – meaning that OnlyFans is also a pyramid scheme. It not only lowers the bar to entry into the sex industry, but also to pimping.
The chat
The attraction for fans is not simply viewing pornographic content, it is also the promise of intimate chat and developing “authentic relationships” with creators (who fans are encouraged to pay with ‘tips’). This means that creators have to spend time making their fans feel like they are listened to and cared about. It is a text message version of what’s known as the “girlfriend experience” in prostitution, which Rae Story describes like this:
“Towards the end of my work as an ‘escort’ I was thoroughly exhausted. The brothel work had been brutal on my body, but the ‘independent escort’ work had exhausted my spirit. Whereas once I just ran the gamut of garden-variety sexual activities with, at best, a distant smile and a ‘good day to you,’ I now had been obsessing over my appearance, my apartment, my advertising, and my ‘image’ as well. I’d been made to adopt the most insidious of all contracts: The Girlfriend Experience – winsome, involved, overly nurturing, and available. Intelligent enough to understand but never enough to contradict. Lying to ‘clients’ about my background, my views, and my habits in order to demonstrate a pleasing personhood for the paying male ego.”
Not only do creators have to come up with a continual stream of pornographic videos and images and promote themselves relentlessly online, they also have to make each one of a stream of (mostly) male strangers feel like she cares about them, think they are interesting and worthy and even that she is the stranger’s very own girlfriend.
As one researcher put it:
“Being an independent explicit online content creator is by many accounts exhausting. Your “fans” are not merely fans, they’re paying customers. To keep that sweet money flowing into their bank accounts, content creators often have to work harder and harder to satisfy their patrons.”
No wonder then that the big accounts hire agencies that provide “chatters” to do this for them. Usually these are low paid workers, often in developing countries, who multiply the deception by being required to pretend to be someone else pretending to be the girlfriend of streams of lonely, misguided and typically entitled men.
After men reveal intimate personal information to what they understood to be the creator, they can feel deeply betrayed and aggrieved if they find out they have been chatting instead to a low paid worker (or a stream of different workers) who might be male and likely on a different continent. When interviewed, chatters say that it can be hard and disturbing work, especially dealing with the pretence and indulging the fans’ sexual fetishes.
AI bots are already beginning to replace human chatters and this is likely to increase. No doubt they will have been “trained” on the chats of both the low paid chatters and the real young women, none of whom will share in the third-party profits generated from their labour. This is global capitalism exploiting every dimension of young people’s efforts to survive in this monstrous dystopia and on the loneliness, alienation, and naivety of vast swathes of men.
Cruel, obsessive and disaffected fans
While taking screenshots or recording content is against the OnlyFans terms and conditions, there is little to stop fans doing this and some fans will do this for nefarious purposes, including sharing it with others, posting on porn sites, selling it, and blackmail – now or in the future. Neighbours, relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues might then see the content and recognise her, often with devastating consequences, including the collapse of her mental health and employment.
Fans are known to research creators’ identities, with the aim of harassing and stalking them. The odds of this happening increase the greater the number of fans you have. This happened to Abi (not her real name) when she was on one of the older webcamming sites:
“Abi started webcamming when she was at university. It seemed so much smarter than doing a menial minimum wage job and she was dismissive of her parents’ concerns. What did they know anyway?
However, it wasn’t long before it went badly wrong. One of her ‘clients’ identified her and started stalking her. It was so terrifying that she had no choice but to turn to the police. They were initially helpful but he remains at large and a very serious threat – so now she can’t do anything online with a public profile because of the risk that he will find her. She has maximum privacy settings on all her accounts and has to avoid some platforms completely.
She’s now graduated and is building a career – but is unable to post a portfolio of her work online because of the continuing risk that he poses. Similarly, she can’t advertise freelance services or have a LinkedIn account, which is a real disadvantage in the field she works in – because that’s a key way employers find contractors and potential employees.”
But even fans who do not do this can become obsessive and demanding, wanting endless attention. They may come to believe that they are in a real intimate relationship and may demand meeting in person for sex. For the woman on the receiving end, this can be exhausting and distressing.
There is a very real emotional cost to being dependent for an income on entitled and often sexist men paying to use you as a sex object or commodity. This can reduce cognitive ability and induce trauma.
A predator’s paradise
We know a number of women whose boyfriends, husbands or partners enticed or coerced them to sign up as a creator on OnlyFans or as a cam girl on one of the older platforms, in order to sponge off her earnings. This is pimping – sex trafficking under international law.
Typically he will pressure her to bring in more and more money, which means more and more extreme and degrading content, longer hours, and pandering to more entitled men. Then she will be doubly trapped – by the system that is so hard to get out of at the best of times and by his coercive control, which often tips into gross violence if she doesn’t meet the targets he sets or displeases him in some other way. If she is tied to him through marriage, shared accommodation and/or joint finances, his control will be practically absolute.
But the predators don’t end there. There are of course professional pimps, like Andrew Tate and all his lookalikes, seeking to entrap unsuspecting girls and young women. There are paedophiles posting child sexual abuse content. And there’s a whole ecosystem of agencies that prey off girls and young women’s sexual exploitation on OnlyFans.
‘Victoria’, a woman who worked for one of these agencies in Australia described how they would help girls and young women scale their accounts, which meant encouraging them to do more and more explicit and degrading acts in order to attract more fans and more money, of which the agency would take a cut. They would also seek out girls on social media and encourage them to set up on OnlyFans. They would encourage those with OnlyFans accounts they managed to give up their day jobs, which would exponentially increase their vulnerability.
They would encourage young women to engage in “age play” – which is a euphemism for pretending to be underage and acting out being sexually abused. The agency graded activity from nudity that fell short of full frontal, through full frontal nudity, ‘straight’ sex, anal sex, right up to bondage, defaecation, physical violence, even bestiality. She said:
“[T]he girls prepared to do the most degrading acts were the most glorified on OnlyFans. We would seek young girls, ‘fresh’ teens, or girls who looked younger than they were and advertise them as ‘barely legal’ or ‘teen’ as that is what made the most money. The youngest girl on our books was 19, but we’d advertise girls who were 20 as 18. The younger the men thought she was, the more popular the girl.”
Victoria’s testimony is deeply disturbing and we recommend that everyone reads it. A key takeaway is the fact that no one makes much money posing in lingerie. You have to take your clothes off and be prepared to let go of any boundaries that you may have had when starting out. That there are large numbers of agencies ruthlessly pushing young women into this and profiting from it and that this is welcomed by governments as a measure of economic success suggests we are in very dark times indeed.
Another twist is that there is now a trend of men setting up as creators and selling videos of sexual activity without the permission of the other party. These videos may have been shot consensually during a relationship on the understanding they were private or they may have been shot clandestinely. There are also documented cases of men selling films of rapes on OnlyFans. And, of course, they share short clips on social media (where kids are likely to view it) to promote the content and drive paying users to the full videos on OnlyFans.
So, OnlyFans also provides a way for treacherous men to profit from their harassment and betrayal of women with whom they have been intimate, turning them into commodities for other men to masturbate to.
In spite of lofty statements about the safety of the platform, there are many documented cases of OnlyFans’s response being too little and too late, and the response from the police is typically also inadequate, while legislation has not kept up with the changing landscape.
The impact on family budgets
An investigation by Reuters on the collateral damage caused by OnlyFans found husbands and male partners were spending a significant proportion of the family income paying for private content on OnlyFans. In one case they investigated, a husband racked up a credit card bill of $135,000. Not surprisingly, this behaviour invariably destroys marriages and family relationships.
We have long known that a large proportion of men who pay for sex acts are married or in long-term relationships – and about the devastation and shame that women typically feel when they find out that their partners have been indulging in this behaviour. One woman described it like this:
“I found out that it had been going on for seven years during his marriage and not just every now and again but at least once a week. He was also masturbating almost daily to porn. He was a sex addict and he was stimulated by variety and illicit encounters. The psychological damage and impact on my self esteem as a woman was devastating.”
In a ‘cost of living crisis’ where many families are struggling to pay for the basics, there is the added betrayal that the money partners, husbands and fathers spent on the sex industry comes out of the family budget. A police woman who did street patrols in an inner-city British neighbourhood told us that she was aware that even men who are on very low wages would regularly pay £5 to a homeless woman for a blowjob – even though they knew that £5 might mean their children did not have shoes that fit for school.
OnlyFans has added to the temptation and has made spending money to use and abuse women sexually as easy as buying a book for your Kindle. It is well documented that porn use can become compulsive, addictive even, and it’s likely that this is even more true on OnlyFans, given that users (fans) can interact (chat) with porn performers directly (or apparently directly) and the ease of funding this with a plastic card or app. This does not excuse this behaviour, but it does make it more understandable.
The impact on the wider culture
The Reuters article mentioned above quotes Meagan Tyler, a researcher at Australia’s La Trobe University, who specializes in harms against women in porn, saying:
“[OnlyFans is] really affecting norms and even our everyday experiences in public places, in private homes, in relationships – and it’s having that effect even if we’ve never visited the site ourselves.”
There are a number of reasons why OnlyFans is having such a powerful and disturbing impact on the wider culture. As mentioned above, creators have to promote themselves relentlessly and they do this by posting pornographic and highly sexualised stills and clips outside of OnlyFans on the public square of social media and community platforms, on which large numbers of kids hang out.
This is normalising porn on a new and epic scale. Radical feminists have been saying for decades that porn is a cultural tool that reinforces and maintains the inequality between the sexes and male domination and female subordination. Furthermore, the logic of the OnlyFans platform, where women are locked in competition with each other, is driving the trend for ever more violent, extreme and degrading content. This extreme behaviour is filtering down into everyone’s consciousness as the template for what sex should be like.
Meanwhile the mainstream media publishes endless stories about the extraordinary amounts of money women can make, apparently with little or no effort, on OnlyFans. This image represents just a few of such headlines.
I was recently speaking to a journalist at one of the most popular British tabloid newspapers and she was profoundly shocked when I told her that the average monthly income on OnlyFans is about US $180 (approximately £135). She had assumed that the media stories were representative. If she, a highly trained and informed journalist, had no idea of the reality, what hope is there for teenage girls?
All of this is grooming girls and young women into seeing their bodies, their selves, and their sexuality as marketable commodities; into seeing pleasing and pandering to men as their key purpose; that suffering indignities, degradation and violence in the course of sex is of no consequence; into seeing superficial financial success as more important than meaningful work; and into seeing men as walking wallets rather than full human beings.
Meanwhile it is grooming boys and young men into becoming sexual predators and pornography makers; into seeing women as objects to be used sexually, to build up their egos; that manhood is dominance over women and children; that selling women and girls to other men to use and abuse is a legitimate way to make money.
This is chilling. It suggests that we are walking into a nihilistic world from which it will be very hard to return. The UK Government is benefiting financially from, and effectively supporting, the global normalisation of sexual violence and misconduct.
OnyFans, like the older webcamming sites, enables men to order up private online sexual performances more easily even than ordering a Deliveroo. This gives them a huge sense of power and entitlement over women at little cost or risk. Over time, and the data suggests that it is seldom a one-off activity, this can lead to men feeling that getting their own way with women is their right, their birthright even, and indignation and anger when thwarted.
This is disturbing because research has long found that these attitudes are associated with violence against women. That OnlyFans and similar platforms are leading to more violence against women and girls (MVAWG) in the general community is borne out by data showing the dramatic increase in reported rapes and child sexual abuse since 2013, for example.
There are those who might argue that OnlyFans is a useful solution to men’s loneliness and social ineptitude. But what it provides is a facsimile, a pretence, of human connection and this is ultimately likely to lead to further loneliness and despair. It is creating a culture that atomises and alienates us all.
As a woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote:
“No one wants to acknowledge the cancer that is sex work on our society. No one wants to, because it brings men pleasure. It’s not just average turning tricks, it’s that, plus cam work, plus OnlyFans, plus shooting videos to upload to a porn site in a seedy motel. A lot of the amateur content creators that I knew on PornHub worked on other things besides filming videos, because not one stream of income is enough to make a living. Unless you have a massive following, and have money from the get go, you need to do more than one thing to earn money in sex work. Those who make money on only one avenue like camming or OnlyFans, are the exception, not the rule. It’s no longer just one way of prostitution; it’s online, it’s massive and it’s too easy to do.”
OnlyFans is big business
OnlyFans is big business and hugely profitable. In less than a decade it has gone from startup in 2016 to being one of the top 50 most visited websites in the world, with more than a billion site visits every month and about 500,000 new subscribers (fans) signing up every day.
Fenix International Limited, the company behind OnlyFans, is registered in the UK. In the 2024 fiscal year, it reported gross revenue of $7.2 billion and net revenue of $1.41 billion, an 8% increase on the previous year. Pre-tax profit was $684 million (a 4% increase) and net profit $520 million. Creator and fan account numbers both grew, with creator accounts up 13% (to 4.6 million) and fan accounts up 24% (to 377.5 million). And that’s not including the profits made from the myriad agencies who are also cashing in, by providing management, chatters, and recruitment of fresh blood, etc.
To put this in context, the annual turnover of the UK fishing fleet was £1.08 billion in 2023 and the steel industry contributes £2.4 billion to UK GDP.
But while the fishing fleet and the steel industry contribute much needed food and essential construction materials, OnlyFans facilitates – and profits from – the packaging of young women as objects for men’s paid consumption and normalises men of all ethnicities paying to sexually use and abuse women and children.
To see this as a positive thing, an economic miracle even, is extreme folly. Lunacy even. For the British government to welcome the boost to the economy must be seen as malfeasance.
Conclusion
In less than a decade, OnlyFans has changed the world, perhaps irrevocably. The next generation of AI will be able to generate the kind of ‘content’ that is most popular on OnlyFans – explicit, brutal, dangerous torture porn. This is almost upon us. How will girls and young women be able to successfully compete with this? We already know that OnlyFans is a conduit into “full service” prostitution, but once AI content becomes the norm, this will only accelerate. Unable to compete, young women who have invested so much in making a life in this brave new world, will have little choice but to move into “servicing” men in the real world. Unless, that is, we take effective action now.
Action to educate people about what is really happening. Action to ban the profiting from the sexual exploitation of women – as we are legally obliged to under international law. Action to deter men from paying to use women sexually, whether that is online or in “real life”. Action to address poverty and to provide real jobs and viable incomes to women. Action to address the epidemic of loneliness and disaffection among men. Action to reconfigure society in line with truly human values.
Further information
Help for parents and teachers
We recommend the following resources for parents who are struggling raising their kids in this porn-soaked world:
Terrifying. I’m a lonely radfem in a ‘progressive’ city and I feel like my peers who are also in their 20s have been absolutely brainwashed by liberal feminism.