It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the year of lockdowns, an age of toilet roll hoarding and people going to the supermarket
dressed in garbage bag protective suits.
But if there was despair in the Spring for one woman, the winter provided hope.
Down on her luck after losing her waitressing job in June, when the fall approached, she
not only couldn’t pay her Netflix subscription fee, but her starving cat had moved in with
her neighbor.
Enough was enough.
This woman of many talents knew there was a way out of the rut, and one day while scrolling
through Facebook she saw the light.
In front of her was the word, “Onlyfans.”
After creating an account and posing for her fans she became an overnight star.
By the time the most lackluster New Year on record rolled around, she was living the dream.
Her cat, brazen as always and not one to miss out on an opportunity, moved back in.
Ok, so that’s not exactly a true story, but we can definitely say it’s based on
a true story.
This website, Onlyfans, has become one of the most talked about sensations in the online
world.
As you’ll see in this show, it’s steeped in controversy, but it’s also provided a
lifeline for many people.
We aren’t just talking about folks making videos for single men who’ve got way too
much time on their hands and subscribe to content they tend to watch three times a day
in five to ten minute intervals.
Onlyfans is bigger than just nudity and copulation, although admittedly that’s a bit like saying
McDonalds is bigger than just burgers.
Today you’re going to learn everything about this website, from its beginnings to its meteoric
rise.
You’re going to find out just how much money it makes and how much creators make.
You’re going to get deep down and dirty and see why so many people would like the
site to disappear from the face of the planet, and you’ll find out who the mysterious owners
of this site are.
Yep, Onlyfans is run by ghosts, or at least people that hide in the shadows.
People really have gone on the site and earned bags of cash after doing very little in a
very short period of time, but before you start thinking about joining up you need to
know that you have to be at least 18 to give it a shot.
It might also help if you have some talent, or are the kind of person, man or woman, who
has the presence to stimulate a viewer.
If you’re 18 or over and can provide ID as well as a selfie shot with that ID, you’re
good to go.
If you join as a creator, you’ll be joining over a million other creators.
If you sign up just to see content, you’ll become one of over 100 million other users.
It’s not free, though, so if you can’t pay to follow someone you’ll be stuck with
the homepage, which is pretty boring to say the least.
Ok, so it appeared on the Internet in 2016.
It was called “revolutionary” not too long after it got off the ground.
We’ll get to the topic of cash soon, but first you need to know why it got so popular
so fast, after all, most people watch it for sexual gratification, and aren’t there like
a million pornography websites out there people can use for free?
The difference is, Onlyfans offers a kind of bespoke experience.
Fans can ask the people they’re following to do certain things, or they can put a date
in their calendar for when the creator has promised to do something new, or strange,
or surprising.
Let’s stay with the sultry stuff for now, because that’s what Onlyfans has been most
associated with from the beginning.
Watching a model do their stuff can be kind of like having a partner except the amount
of love involved is negligible.
One American model we found said when it comes to her regular customers she will know when
their birthdays are, what their pets are called, or even the names of their children.
That’s true.
Her name is Dannii Harwood.
So, imagine during lockdown a man was feeling a little isolated and there was a stirring
in his loins.
Sure, he could go to a well-known site and type into the search box, “smoking nurse”
– yep, that’s what gets him off – but wouldn’t it be better if that nurse knew
his name and asked him how the accountancy job was going.
That’s one reason Onlyfanss is so popular: The intimacy, or at least what seems like
intimacy.
Those fans will usually pay anywhere from $5 to $50 for a monthly subscription for one
creator and they can see pictures, videos, and if they add a little tip, they can get
something special.
The strange thing is, creators don’t necessarily get more cash if they post content that is
more explicit.
Just because someone is willing to do strange things with a banana and some chocolate mousse
doesn’t mean they’ll find success.
As of January 2020, the most popular creator of the platform was a model named Jem Wolfie.
This very attractive woman cut her teeth on Instagram and once she’d amassed millions
of followers there she hitched a ride with Onlyfans.
She’s sometimes called a “fitness model”, but this isn’t really the case.
She might talk about food and exercise, but for the most part, her mostly male fans are
there because she’s good-looking.
If she tells her fans to quit the French fries and get down with a bowl of quinoa, you can
be sure she won’t be wearing a boiler suit.
What we’re trying to say is people on this platform aren’t always looking for X-rated
content, far from it.
It’s the reveal that counts.
It’s like this, if you go to a nudist beach, and this Infographics writer’s been to plenty,
nudity soon becomes a bit blasé.
It’s not knowing what’s underneath that really gets people hot and flustered, especially
when more is revealed at a slow pace.
As you’ll see, this can also be addictive and costly.
Ms. Wolfie by the way was at one point making $30,000 dollars every single day, and all
she really had to do was talk and look sexy.
Obviously to get that kind of cash you need to have been blessed with certain genes.
Yep, some of us are born to endless night, some to pure delight.
Let’s talk a bit more about making money.
Perhaps one of the biggest controversies involved an American actress and model named Bella
Thorne.
She made an astounding $1 million in one day on the platform.
She told her fans that she’d go the full Monty if they provided her with a couple of
hundred bucks.
When the time came, she wasn’t nude at all and was dressed in lingerie.
Some of those desperados who’d sent her their hard-earned money demanded their cash
back.
As for sex workers that actually do take off all their kit on the site, they were livid.
Here was a woman trespassing on their patch.
We’ll get back to sex workers soon.
The person that makes the most cash on Onlyfans is a woman named Blac Chyna.
She rakes in something like $20 million a month.
This celebrity has had her boobs done, lips done, butt done, and so you won’t be surprised
to hear she’s appeared on the cringeworthy immensely popular reality TV show, Keeping
Up With the Kardashians, a show that kind of represents having your life done.
For 20 bucks a month you can watch Chyna doing stuff that makes men with a foot fetish soil
their underwear.
The reason ready-made stars make so much cash is because a lot of people in this world are
crazy about celebrities, and with Onlyfans you can get up close to them and even ask
them to do stuff.
For them it’s, practically a pay-for-play religious experience that’s on-demand.
One of the biggest male celebrities on there is the American rapper named Aaron Carter.
He goes a bit further than the women we’ve just talked about in that he really will go
the full Monty for a price.
Other guys have made a fortune, too, such as the YouTube star named Nik Avocado.
For a monthly fee, you can watch this hyper-active, melodramatic human-Smurf eat 10 kilos of fast
food in one sitting.
If you’re wondering why people are willing to pay to watch some loud goof eat lots of
food, we have to get a bit scientific.
First, you need to know that a man once coined the term “limbic capitalism”, referring
to the part of the brain called the limbic system and how it can be exploited.
This part of the brain wants stimuli, in fact, it’s addicted to stimuli.
That’s why so many influencers are colorful and loud and over the top.
That bit of the brain is responsible for you buying a power-up on Angry Birds Friends,
it’s why you can’t put down your damned phone.
Tech companies know how to create addictive products, and Onlyfans is one of them.
The stimuli in this case is much more intense because you can direct the movie, you can
see novel acts and explore your fetishes, but only if you keep tipping the performer.
The site is like sexual heroin; you always have to go back to the dealer for that one
last hit.
What’s also alluring is the fact you never quite know what product you’ll get.
Ok, enough of celebrities and influencers.
What about the hardworking folks who are just trying to make a living?
Well, think about 2020, the year that just being outside made you feel like a criminal;
the year approaching strangers almost became an actual crime.
Who do you think suffered the most in the underground world?
Yep, sex workers weren’t exactly in high demand during the great pandemic of 2020.
But they found a way of making money, and that was through Onlyfans.
We found women who said Onlyfans wasn’t just helping them making money, but it was
“diversifying” and “normalizing” sex work.
This, they said, is great, but others said if you want to make a lot of cash you really
have to put the effort in.
Standing on a street corner became setting up a bedroom studio and acting out people’s
fantasies.
Then there’s the controversy, a lot of controversy.
One woman in the UK had an act where she’d dress up like a young girl.
Critics say this is exploitation and unethical, normalizing something that’s wrong.
They also blast the business as being another kind of exploitation in the new gig economy.
That might be true, but it’s a complicated issue, and if you’re a person that lost
a job and relied on the platform to make cash, you may feel you are not being exploited.
We found some ordinary women online who’d never taken off their clothes for money before
who were earning ok from doing just that on Onlyfans.
Some of them were new to the site, as were many people in 2020.
From February 2020 to April 2020 during the COVID assault, there were 1.85 million new
subscribers on the site.
Some women posing nude were only earning a few hundred dollars a month, some thousands,
but it was enough they said to put a roof over their head.
This is another reason for the site’s popularity, not only because out of work people have found
a niche, but it’s also a kind of acceptable pornography.
The girl and boy next door are using the site to make cash, and somehow that’s more acceptable
than real pornography.
Newbies helping people get their rocks off has led to more controversy, though, because
investigations found some of those people wanting to make some fast cash had used fake
IDs.
They hadn’t yet reached the age of 18.
Ok, but what about the grown-up folks that say this site is their golden egg?
Now we will introduce a former male go-go dancer who in the gay world would probably
fit the description of “bear.”
He’s a bit of a hunk, and rather than swing from poles in city clubs he now earns his
crust doing it online.
He said in an interview that he gives his fans a boyfriend experience, something you
can’t find on any other platform.
He said with Onlyfans he can take off his clothes for someone but the experience is
an intimate one.
As for the fans, they feel they’re directing their own movie.
For that, the creator earns $10,000 a month.
Then there’s the story of the working-class girl from the UK.
In the past, she’d done nude photos for magazines, something she kept secret until
one day her father went to the factory and saw his naked daughter pinned to a locker
in the locker room.
He didn’t much enjoy the banter that day.
Taking off her clothes online, she said, is better than doing it where the whole world
can see you.
She was actually one of the first models on Onlyfans, making in the region of $250 a month
at the start.
She then started dressing up, doing special shows on certain days, and she even let men
bet on her if she ordered a pizza but went to collect it from the delivery guy with no
clothes on.
She became a big success after that.
She told the New York Times that this way men were getting a much better experience
than they did from porn.
“I’m like their online girlfriend,” she said.
Soon she was bringing in $50,000 a month and that was without being a celeb.
Like all the other Onlyfans creators, she gets 80 percent of what she brings in.
Onlyfans gets a 20 percent cut, but with all the processing fees, the site actually gets
12 percent.
The question is, who are these people taking their 12 percent?
That’s still a bit of a mystery.
It was started by a British company called Fenix International Limited, but if you Google
that, you won’t find a website.
You can see it’s an entertainment company based in London, and you can see its annual
revenue is $4.59 million, but that’s about it.
So, who’s this entertainment company?
We actually don’t know too much, and it looks to us that journalists that have asked
the question have also come up empty-handed as to the day to day running of the company.
What we did find is a guy who speaks on behalf of the secret company and his name is Daniel
Blythe.
When he was contacted by the media he said no way will he allow his clients to be interviewed
and there’s also no way he’ll say who they are.
Still, we do know that an Englishman named Tim Stokely founded the company and he’s
still there with his father, Guy Stokely.
Tim got the idea to start the site after looking at platforms such as Instagram, and then he
thought, hmm, Instagram, Uber, why not create a site where influencers can monetize their
content easily.
It was a breakthrough moment.
We’re not sure he ever thought the most popular kind of content would be sexual...
Maybe he had cooking in mind, or gardening, or maybe he knew exactly what would happen.
To say his idea was good would be a massive understatement.
In December 2020, 500,000 people were using the site each day and it was paying out $200
million a month to the creators.
As for users, during that year 150,000 new ones were joining every day.
In sales that year it generated in the region of $2 billion, so when it took its 20 percent
it got $400,000,000 net.
Not bad for a site only four years old.
As for those top earners, Onlyfans is a bit like life itself.
The vast majority of the money that goes through the site goes to big stars, what you could
call the Onlyfans Elites.
It’s thought the top one percent of creators earn 33 percent of the cash.
The site is only going to get bigger as more influencers, models, musicians, actors, you
name it, realize they can make it big there.
Right now the company is looking at opening new offices in Asia and Latin America.
Onlyfans may have started out attracting folks in the porn niche, but that’s a thing of
the past.
Mixing Instagram with YouTube with Pornhub with Facebook will likely work, and while
our limbic systems override our frontal lobes, we might not be able to resist the temptation.
Now you need to watch this, “How Successful Is Pornhub?”
Or, have a look at this, “Female Orgasm vs Male Orgasm - How Do They Compare?”