OnlyFans, if you’re not already familiar with it, is a subscription platform where creators charge fans for videos, photos, direct messages, pay-per-view content, and tips. Launched in 2016, it features musicians, chefs, actors, fitness trainers, and more. Superstars like Blac Chyna, Bella Thorne, Cardi B, and Iggy Azalea connect with their fans on the platform and rake in millions of dollars monthly from the interactions.
But as anyone from the Gen Z or Millennial cohorts knows, those aren’t the content creators who really define OnlyFans’ reputation. The large majority of its five million creators (around 80%) produce and post homemade sexually explicit material—often drawn in by social media buzz and testimonials about the easy money to be made.
Most aren’t celebrities of any kind when they sign up, nor are they porn stars with a previous career in the sexual entertainment industry. They’re ordinary people who might not otherwise have considered posting their spicy pics and vids but hope to pick up some extra money at a time when steady, well-paying jobs are hard to come by.
The OnlyFans creator workforce mirrors the demographics that have long defined the sex industry, skewing heavily female (84%) and young, with 86% aged 18 to 24. Subscribers, as might be expected, are mostly male (87%), with the majority between 18 and 34 years old.
In 2026, those subscribers spent $7.8 billion on OnlyFans—up 7.6% from the year before—according to a new report from OnlyFinder, “OnlyFans Wrapped 2026.” Creators collectively shared about $6.2 billion of that. OnlyFans kept the rest, $1.6 billion, for operating the app that connects the two sides of the transaction.
“Bring your own audience”
OnlyFinder, founded in 2020, is a third-party search engine that bills itself as the world’s first and largest discovery platform for OnlyFans. In an interview with People’s World, OnlyFinder CEO Max Anderson explained why a discovery platform separate from OnlyFans itself even needs to exist.
Despite OnlyFans having more than 400 million users and five million creators, the platform offers no built-in way for fans to search for or browse new creators. That’s not an oversight, according to Anderson, but the product of “a longstanding implicit agreement between OnlyFans and its creators wherein the platform provides discretion and creators are expected to ‘bring your own audience.’”
Creators have to market themselves and do all the heavy lifting of building a subscriber base. The result, he said, is that OnlyFans users lean heavily on outside sites to find creators—a market OnlyFinder dominates, running its flagship search engine alongside a network of several hundred other discovery sites worldwide that together draw more than 100 million unique users a year.
Anderson also said the growth in OnlyFans spending tracks a pattern that has nothing to do with the platform itself. OnlyFinder’s data shows a consistent inverse relationship between OnlyFans usage and the broader economy, he said: Spending rises when the stock market falls, a recession sets in, or inflation climbs, and cools off when conditions improve.
“The same is true of many ‘vice’ or ‘sin’ products such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, gentlemen’s clubs, etc.,” Anderson said. “‘Sin’ categories in the economy tend to actually do better during recessions than they do during bull markets. When times are hard, people seem to turn towards their vices for relief.”
The same is true for the people producing “sin” material for consumption; when money is tight, more people start filming and uploading.
The report’s numbers on who’s subscribing and paying are worth a look of their own.
The United States accounts for $4.82 billion of global OnlyFans spending, 62% of the total and more than the other 212 countries tracked combined. Europe spends another 22% of the total, with the rest of the world tallying 16%.
New York City alone spent nearly $170 million in 2025, more than 208 countries. Nationally, the U.S. spends $180,514 per 10,000 adults. Portland, Oregon, drags up that average, though, and leads the world at $455,291 per 10,000 adults.
The global economic imbalance that shows up in OnlyFans’ nation-by-nation statistics is only one side of an arrangement that is defined by inequality in nearly every aspect of its operation.
The OnlyFans profit model
On the content creation side of the transaction, OnlyFans doesn’t produce anything. Unlike the porn companies of the past, it runs no studios, employs no performers, and buys no video or audio equipment. Its only product is the digital infrastructure—the app, the payment processing, and the recommendation system that decides who gets seen.
For providing those services, it takes a fixed 20% cut of every subscription, tip, and pay-per-view purchase, regardless of how much a given creator makes in a given month. Those at the bottom pay the same fees as those at the top.
That cut is, in fact, more generous to creators than the one charged by the older XXX cam-site industry OnlyFans displaced. Anderson said the more favorable split was part of what drove creators and fans toward OnlyFans in the first place: “The business model also gives creators 80% of the money spent by fans, compared with older cam sites that could take 70-75%, which helped drive creators and fans toward OnlyFans.”
It’s also inspired a range of similar platforms, including Fansly, LoyalFans, and the mostly gay-oriented JustForFans.
The people putting themselves in front of the camera and producing the content cover all the costs of production, including cameras, microphones, specialized lighting, props, computers for editing, travel costs for collabs with other content creators, location rentals, health care, and more.
They also absorb the risks of a slow month, changing consumer tastes, or reputational harm—which is not insignificant at a time when respectability politics is still being weaponized to attack people. The platform collects its percentage no matter what happens along the way.
How much money do people really make?
And just what kind of money are OnlyFans creators earning for all their effort and risk?
According to industry data from Desirely.co, a firm that markets AI chatbot services to help creators automate communications with their subscribers, publishing content on sites like OnlyFans can be very lucrative—for a small few.
The average monthly earnings for an OnlyFans creator is $131. It’s a paltry sum, but it doesn’t tell the full story of the massive inequality that defines the payout system.
The highest earners, who make millions of dollars from the platform, typically aren’t creating adult content; they’re already stars in the music or modelling world. For the “average” person posting their material on the site, the checks aren’t nearly as big.
A handful do pretty well. The top 1% of creators receive on average $4,300 per month, or over $50,000 annually. The top 10% pull in an average of $950 a month—not enough to live on but still considerable supplemental income.
For the other 90% of those uploading videos—over 4.17 million peole—the monthly payout from OnlyFans averages a pitiful $39.
So, despite the social media memes hyping the income potential of platforms like OnlyFans, the reality for most people is that it’s a lot of work for not a lot of money.
Commodifying desire
It’s worth placing that reality inside a longer pattern rather than treating it as a story specific to this one platform.
Capitalism has spent centuries pulling activities that used to sit outside the market—domestic labor, childcare, companionship, physical intimacy—into it, wherever there was a way to price and scale them. Sex work long predates any app; what the platform era changes is the mechanism.
A creator on OnlyFans isn’t selling an hour of labor in a fixed location the way a retail or service worker does. They’re selling an ongoing, mediated relationship with an audience that can be anywhere on Earth, priced by the message, the photo, or the month. Digital infrastructure is what makes a market like that possible at global scale—the same infrastructure that lets a gig platform price out a ride or a delivery and sell it across a whole metro area.
Applied to intimacy, it means the rent collector sits between people and their own image, attention, and time, rather than between a rider and a driver.
None of that is a comment on the choice to do this kind of work. People take jobs, including producing and posting sexual content online, for the same reasons people take any job: It pays, and the available alternatives pay less or offer less control over their own time.
What’s worth scrutinizing isn’t the individuals finding income where they can get it. It’s a system that keeps finding new and more intimate territory to turn into a revenue stream and a platform sitting in the middle of this particular one, collecting a fixed cut of the proceeds without producing any of it.
In a lot of ways, that structure also puts OnlyFans in the same basic category as YouTube, Twitch, Uber, DoorDash, and other apps: Companies whose core product is a marketplace connecting a dispersed, independently contracted workforce to customers, funded by a cut of transactions it never has to pay to produce.
Anderson, who studies OnlyFans’ economics for a living, draws the same comparison.
“OnlyFans is a marketplace connecting independent creators with paying customers, much like Uber and DoorDash connect independent providers with consumers,” he said. “Successful creators have to think like small businesses, acquiring customers, managing retention, differentiating themselves, and reinvesting in marketing.”
The difference, he added, is that OnlyFans creators sell their own content and services directly and can earn through tips and pay-per-view messages on top of subscriptions—giving them, in his telling, a more direct relationship with their customers than a rideshare driver has with a passenger.
But it also means that OnlyFans creators have an extra marketing burden to carry; no Uber driver has to individually advertise themselves directly to customers and convince a rider to choose them over someone else.
An OnlyFans union?
The comparison to other app workers raises an obvious, if unlikely, question: If Uber drivers and DoorDash couriers, for instance, are starting to win the right to organize into labor unions, should OnlyFans creators be thinking about the same thing?
The analogy isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Drivers have made real headway on exactly this front over the past few years. California passed a pair of bills—Assembly Bill 1340, backed by SEIU California, and Senate Bill 371, backed by Uber and Lyft themselves—creating a legal path for app-based drivers to organize and bargain collectively, something independent-contractor status has historically made impossible.
Massachusetts moved faster. After voters there approved a 2024 ballot measure, the state’s Department of Labor Relations certified the App Drivers Union, backed by SEIU 34BJ and the Machinists union, as the official bargaining representative for drivers at Uber, Lyft, and several smaller rideshare companies. In August this year, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill extending similar rights to an estimated 100,000 Uber and Lyft drivers in that state.
None of these arrangements reclassify drivers as employees—they remain independent contractors—but each one opens a legal channel for collective bargaining over pay and conditions that didn’t exist before.
Not everyone considers that a clean win. Jacobin published a piece this summer arguing the California deal undermines the very drivers it’s supposed to empower, pointing out that regulators sweetened it for Uber and Lyft by agreeing to back separate legislation easing the insurance requirements the companies had lobbied against.
Whatever the verdict on any single deal, the fact that legislatures have started treating “independent contractor” as a status that can be renegotiated by law rather than a fixed condition of platform work is still progress.
Applying that model to OnlyFans runs into some real differences, of course. Drivers share a common, immediate grievance—a fare cut, a deactivation policy, an insurance requirement—and they occupy identifiable local labor markets: a city, an airport, a metro area, which is exactly the unit these new state laws have organized around.
OnlyFans creators are dispersed around the globe, often using pseudonyms or alter egos for their work. They’re also competing directly with each other for the same subscribers’ attention and money rather than sharing a territory.
Any organizing drive would also have to contend with the stigma still attached to adult content work, which cuts against public organizing in a way that driving a car doesn’t. And no state legislature has proposed anything resembling a bargaining-rights extension for content-platform creators the way several now have for rideshare and delivery drivers.
Sexploitation
None of that changes the underlying arrangement, though. A platform that takes a fixed fifth of the income generated by five million people, sets the terms for their access to an audience, and owes them nothing if their subscriber base dries up is functioning as an employer in every sense but the legal one.
Drivers spent years hearing that this was simply the nature of gig work until enough of them organized, lobbied, and voted to change the law that defined it that way.
Whether OnlyFans creators ever go down a similar road is an open question. There’s no organizing drive underway, and the obstacles described above are real. But a $7.8-billion-a-year platform built entirely on other people’s labor, arriving at a moment when driver unions have just demonstrated that “independent contractor” doesn’t have to be a permanent condition, is at least worth measuring against the same standard.
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