The online subscription service is the ‘adult’ version of a social media platform, allowing famous women to sell the illusion of intimacy. But it’s not only the fans who pay a price.
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Actress Bella Thorne is among the famous women who have earned big paydays on OnlyFans. Photo: Elena Vizzoca/SOPA Images/Zuma Press
If you’re a woman in the public eye, then regardless of your other talents or accomplishments, to some degree you will always also exist as a sex object. It’s a basic feature of human sexuality: For some men, the first involuntary thought on seeing any woman will always be: “Would I?”
Fame is fleeting, and female celebrities have long chosen to monetize it by blurring the line between mainstream entertainment and “adult” material. Many famous musicians, actresses, athletes and other entertainers posed for Playboy. The queen of this type of celebrity is Kim Kardashian, who gained notoriety when her sex tape was leaked in 2007 and parlayed it into a multimedia career as a reality TV star and entrepreneur.
A leaked sex tape featuring Ray J and Kim Kardashian, seen here in March 2006, helped turn Kardashian into a multimedia star. Photo: John Shearer/WireImage
Today, the most lucrative way for many female celebrities to sell sex is OnlyFans. In theory, it is a content-neutral platform that enables any individual to sell subscriptions of any kind to fans, promising “creative ownership,” “inclusivity” and “freedom” to would-be “creators.” In practice, though, 70% of its 4.1 million creators focus on adult content. OnlyFans offers a twist on traditional pornography by giving “fans” the opportunity to interact with performers, via purchased extras such as explicit messaging and tailored content by request.
Rapper Iggy Azalea has one of the highest-earning OnlyFans accounts. Photo: suzanne cordeiro/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The result is a potent combination of adult content with influencer-style “social” fandom, whose success is attested by the site’s popularity. According to independent reports it has over 300 million users, of which 70% are male, and 4.1 million creators, 84% of whom are women. While only 1% of those 4.1 million earn over $100,000 a year via the site, the pinnacle of OnlyFans can be very lucrative—especially for celebrities who parlay an existing platform into adult-content subscription.
Singer Lily Allen said last year that she earned more money selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than from streams of her music. Photo: Getty Images
The Australian rapper and model Iggy Azalea, for example, charges $24.99 a month for her OnlyFans content and regularly tops industry analysis of the highest-earning OnlyFans accounts. She told the Los Angeles Times that she made so much money in her first month she “couldn’t even say how much it is.” The Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B succeeded in persuading so many of her 71 million Instagram fans to follow her to a $4.99 OnlyFans subscription that she reportedly earned over $9 million a month. The actress Bella Thorne, a former Disney Channel star, made history in 2020 when she was the first person to make $1 million in a single day after joining OnlyFans, the company announced at the time.
No wonder female celebrities opt to cross to the “adult” side, especially when they are past the peak of their fame and earning power. Lily Allen, a British singer who had two platinum-selling albums in the 2000s, posted on X last year that she earned more money selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than from streams of her music on Spotify. Drea de Matteo, who won an Emmy for her role on “The Sopranos” in 2004, has said that she joined OnlyFans after acting work dried up and she faced foreclosure on her mortgage.
OnlyFans is the X-rated version of a social media platform, much as pornographic movies used to be the X-rated version of Hollywood. But there is one critical sense in which OnlyFans can be more perilous than former kinds of “adult entertainment,” both for female celebrities and for the culture at large. Pre-digital celebrities sold an entertainment product: a movie, an album, a concert ticket. Today, the product is the performers themselves.
Fandom pre-dates the digital revolution. Its essence is a feeling of intense, one-sided connection to the famous person: think of the fainting teens at mid-century Elvis concerts. But social media has intensified its immediacy, via platforms that enable influencers to share intimate details of their lives, and also has created a compelling sense of dialogue. The digital fandom relationship feels far more like a conversation—even when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort—because there is always the possibility of a reply from its object.
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This kind of pseudo-interactive relationship is now described as “parasocial,” and it is at the heart of influencers’ success, whether the content is family-friendly on YouTube or pornographic on OnlyFans. The influencer economy runs on a potent feedback loop between fame, notoriety, voyeurism and parasocial engagement. OnlyFans is built to monetize this loop, rather than just adult images as such. Its user base first exploded during 2020, as mandatory lockdowns forcibly constrained real-world social interaction. What it offers isn’t just sexual release but something that feels a bit like a relationship—a subscription girlfriend, if you will, without any of the inconveniences that come with a real one.
If a girlfriend-like subscription service seems enticing, the appeal of paying a little more for virtual sexual access to an actual celebrity is even more potent. Old-style fandom was already intense and has left many tragic casualties over the years. The parasocial kind can lead to so-called “audience capture,” in which an immediate, intense, intimate-feeling and financially remunerative two-way relationship with a devoted fan base can induce far-reaching apparent changes in the object of worship. One example is the YouTube creator Nikocado Avocado, who initially made videos of himself playing the violin but has by degrees evolved to ever more extreme “mukbang” eating challenges in response to comments from his growing audience.
YouTuber Nikocado Avocado has made ever more extreme ‘mukbang’ videos in which he eats large amounts of food. Photo: Nikocado Avocado/Associated Press
The cast of the Sopranos at a 2024 reunion, including Drea de Matteo, right, who has said she joined OnlyFans to avoid foreclosure on her mortgage. Photo: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
In the context of porn, the likely trajectory of such audience capture is clear. Recently, the British porn performer Bonnie Blue made headlines when she filmed herself having sex with over 1,000 men in a single hours-long session. OnlyFans did not host the video, saying that it violated the platform’s policy of verifying the identity, age and consent of everyone who appears on the site. But in the aftermath of the news coverage, Blue’s OnlyFans subscription numbers have soared, and she says she is now earning $1 million a month. In the world of influencer clickbait, there is no such thing as a bad headline.
Speaking to documentary-maker Josh Pieters, OnlyFans creator Alex le Tissier recently described how navigating the escalating, sometimes unnervingly depraved requests of a growing fanbase can feel “like doing a deal with the Devil.” Another creator, Lizzy Groombridge, has described how she stopped posting explicit videos on OnlyFans after fan messages became increasingly degrading and unpleasant, saying “I felt objectified by creepy men.” Unlike in a real relationship, in the subscription version only the paying audience gets to have needs.
Some celebrities seem to have recognized this. Cardi B. and Bella Thorne cashed in on OnlyFans and then quit the platform. But it is easy to imagine others becoming trapped, especially if they joined out of financial desperation. On OnlyFans, human beings become products, formed in dialogue with a hungry, horny audience. And many creators discover too late that they don’t want to become what the audience is paying them to be.
Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and the author of “Feminism Against Progress.”
Corrections & Amplifications
OnlyFans did not post a video of pornographic performer Bonnie Blue having sex with more than 1,000 men. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the video was taken down after being posted. (Corrected on March 14)
