What is it like to Actually Run an OnlyFans Page

Choking the chicken, tickling the taco, flicking the bean, whatever you want to call the friction-filled act of self-love, everyone masturbates. Yes, even your partner or spouse when you go out with your friends. According to the T.E.N.G.A 2018 Global Self-Pleasure Report, a whopping seventy-eight percent of adults around the world masturbate. 

Now unless you’re living in a cave in the mountains or believe technology comes from Satan, chances are that you use porn. At least 382 million people logged on to XVideos in 2020 according to Similarweb. 

 

While XVideos was the top-rated porn website around the world, a rather different website has stolen the show. The popular website Onlyfans has become a mostly household name synonymous with pornographic content. The website first came online in 2016 as a more adult alternative to Patreon. Not only did OnlyFans allow adult content but it seemed to embrace you paying a woman or man to perform the most niche of genres.

While the Onlyfans model seems simple enough and a handful of people make millions, the truth is that running an Onlyfans page is more effort than it's worth for almost every average creator.

 

It is true that if you gain enough followers on the website you can make thousands in half a second, however, this is not the reality for most people using the website. Look at the youtube Kawaii (Japanese word for cute) star, Belle Delphine as a perfect example of someone making it big. Before Onlyfans, Delphine was known for her internet trolling and her lewd and oddly sexual child-like videos. According to Insider, Delphine made 1.2 million dollars after starting an OnlyFans page in just a single month. Based on her Onlyfans profit postings it’s easy to think, “hell, if that girl can do it, so I can.” In theory, all you need is a phone and an internet connection. 

 

The numbers back up this idea. By September 2022, 1.5 million content creators were using the site according to The Small Business Blog. Now it’s unfair to say that all of those people are making porn. However, Belle Delphine hit the nail on the head with the problem within the Onlyfans model. She had this to say when interviewed by Insider, 

 

“People can see me and see my numbers and think, 'Oh, she's doing really well so that means I can do really well. For every one successful girl you see, there are thousands of other girls working really hard and not earning anything."

 

So now while Belle Delphine can sell her used bathwater to strangers on the internet for $50 a jar, few creators on the website are making any money. 

 

To try and parse out the average experience of running a page, I set out into the depths of Onlyfans to gather as many interviews as possible with the average creators using the website. Sadly, most creators were not willing to speak at all because of the social stigma that Onlyfans carries and the fact that most of their families and friends don’t know that they run a page. 

 

However, a few were willing to be interviewed on the basis of anonymity. The short version of their reality they told me is that while a handful of women get a huge payday for a handful of pictures the simple fact is that most people don’t even break even. 

 

One woman based in the United States whom we will call Sally was working up to eighteen hours a day on her page and roughly thirty hours a week on just content planning. These creators have to do the job of an entire ten-plus-person production team. Recording, editing, marketing, PR, client engagement, content planning, you probably get the idea. 

 

Sally reported getting over a thousand messages a day and having systems in place to auto-respond to the sheer volume of messages and requests. 

 

On top of the onslaught of messages, Sally reported receiving daily harassment and abuse from users requesting free content and forgetting the simple fact that she is a human being performing a job when she says no. It would be the same as calling your bartender a bi*ch, wh*re, or whatever because they wouldn’t give you free shots when you asked. No one in her social circles knows that she runs a page from fear of disownment. To top it all off she reported being asked for scat videos several times and then harassed and abused when she denied the request. Sadly, nearly 100% of the other creators I interviewed also had been asked for scat-related content. 

 

Now for the question, everyone has been waiting for, how much do these creators make from their pages? The short answer is it ranges, but Sally reported her total net profit from her page after expenses and taxes was only $10,000 a year.   

 

Unfortunately for Sally, this is not an isolated situation. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the average income of an Onlyfans user is only $180 a month excluding tips. The creators that agreed to be interviewed reported similar numbers with less than fifty dollars a month on the low end. 

 

The vast majority of women I interviewed turned out to be based in South America and Argentina to be specific. This left me with an ethical dilemma. At the time of writing the minimum wage in Argentina was roughly 33,000 Argentinean pesos or just shy of 300 US dollars a month. 

 

The woman that will we call Maria is an Argentinian-based creator and told a vastly different side of the same coin. Maria had reported that she worked anywhere from two hours a day to over ten hours a day. She made all her content with her boyfriend as it was the best job available when compared to the traditional jobs available to her. She was making $300 to over $1000 a month depending on the amount of work she put into her page. Maria reported that while only her boyfriend knew about her page, she knew a lot of women and couples doing the same thing due to the economic situation in Argentina. And yes she was also asked to make a scat video. 

 

As a general note, the South American pages were markedly cheaper than Western-run pages. So the question becomes, is it okay that Westerners get their rocks off on global economic depressions? Only time can tell. However, when Maria reported that more and more people she knew were signing up and creating pages after they saw famous people make millions overnight from their Onlyfans pages. That fact made me wonder something. What happens when the wrong famous person goes too far? 

 

Introducing former Disney star Bella Thorne. Originally famous for the television series, Shake it Up. In 2020, Bella Thorne truly shook up OnlyFan's internal economy. In August of 2020, Bella Thorne started an Onlyfans page and raked in a cool million dollars in one day according to CNN. She promised nude photos for $200 a pop. Unfortunately for the Johns, they were not in fact nudes but simply lewd photos that implied nudity. In short, a scam. 

 

Okay, so some people got scammed, so what? Well, it royally screwed a lot of normal creators that use the website to put food on the table. Her stunt is rumored to cost Onlyfans millions. In Onlyfans’ terms of service, any scams will be refunded to whatever credit card they used to pay for Thorne’s $200 Pay per View (PPV) scam photos. Now, what does that mean for normal creators? 

 

Podcast host and Onlyfans creator Erika Heidewald went off on Thorne in a masterpiece of a Twitter thread. Here’s the best example of how these spicy creators got screwed by Thorne’s stunt.

 

“PPV messages are frequently used by sex workers to sell more explicit content. Let’s say you’re selling a video of you sucking your boyfriend’s d*ck. If you sell that for $50, OF keeps 20%, so you get $40. BUT you have to pay taxes on that. Maybe you get $30-32. Is it worth it to you to sell videos of yourself sucking dick for a maximum of $32? Can you make a living at it? What if you used to sell them for $150 or $200, can you survive a pay cut like that? Could YOU at YOUR job survive a sudden 85% pay cut & monthly payday?” 

 

The long-short of what Heidewald was alluding to was that Onlyfans changed the rules of their payout system because of Thorne’s page. The rule changes included that PPV videos could only be sold for a max of fifty dollars and every creator would only be paid out once a month. Now OnlyFans denied that Thorne was the reason for the pay cuts and at the time of this article, most of the changes have been reversed. While the payment structure has returned to normal the social reality of running a page has never really changed.

 

 

Most creators interviewed for this article and other articles quoted in this piece had reported feeling discriminated against for working in the sex industry and it seems that OnlyFans shares this sentiment. In late 2021 they announced they would be banning all adult content. They walked the decision back, but it stands as a testament that even though the average adult content creators helped the website earn 400 million in earnings in 2020, they could be tossed aside if and when Onlyfans changed its mind. 

 

This is not to say that everyone running a page should just suddenly stop. A lot of women and men in the global south use the website to make more money than they could make in their traditional economies. Some creators honestly love making porn and that’s fine. No one should be ashamed for doing what they love. For other people using the website, it was their only option for income at the time. 

 

However, the reality is simple, running an OnlyFans page is hard work. It can take years to grow a page to a profitable point. There’s a chance that broader society will unjustly shun you and call you a “wh*re” or a “sl*t”. You will be working well over twelve hours a day and will most likely face daily harassment from people who refuse to see you as a real person. At best you make a grand or two a month and some cheap Johns harass you. At worst you’ll be asked to make a shot-for-shot remake of two girls, one cup for fifty dollars.