What do pop star Lily Allen, Olympic gold medal-winning diver Jack Laugher, tennis player Nick Kyrgios and 25-year-old Bonnie Blue from Nottingham, who has filmed herself having sex with hundreds of 18-year-old students (and sometimes their dads, too), all have in common?
Yes, you guessed it. They are all ‘creatives’ on OnlyFans, the adults-only online content provider founded in 2016 by a young Essex businessman called Tim Stokely, which is now one of the most visited (and lucrative) websites in the world.
Just last month, Lily Allen caused a stir by revealing that she makes more money charging $10 (£8) – the site works in dollars – for pictures of her feet on her OnlyFans account labelled ‘La Dolca Feeta’ than she does from her 7.5million monthly listeners on Spotify.
But Lily’s content is tame in comparison to much of the content on the site, the sort company execs refer to as ‘spicy’. Everything from cheeky shots of bottoms peeking out of bubble baths, blondes stirring vats of steaming pasta in G-strings, hot men waxing cars in their pants, right through the sex spectrum to twosomes, threesomes, sixsomes and hardcore pornographic videos.
But also because, thanks to the allure of OnlyFans and the astonishing sums that a teeny number of the platform’s 4.1million creatives are raking in, more and more young women (and it is mostly young women) who would never have considered it before are suddenly happy to join in and sell photos of, well, pretty much anything, to pay rent, settle credit card bills or splash out on nice holidays. Basically, a flashier life all round.
‘We feel empowered. We have agency. It’s completely up to me if I take my top off or not,’ says one 21-year-old girl, who joined a year ago and makes enough in a week to cover a year’s student rent at Sheffield University and prefers not to give her name.
‘And I am happy to do it because for once I make the rules, in the safety of my home and they’re paying me to do it. It’s a mug’s game, but I am not the mug.’
For the benefit of those readers who are not among the site’s 305million users, OnlyFans offers creators a platform where they can charge their fans a subscription fee ranging from $4.99 to $49.99 a month to look at their content, contact them (or more often access their ‘chatter’ – more of which later) and access often more explicit, personalised, ‘à la carte’ content through ‘tips’.
‘Pay $10 to unlock this video’. ‘Click here for more spicy content’. ‘The more you pay, the more you see’. You get the gist.
In 2023, the site generated a record $6.6billion (£5.2billion), of which the company takes a straight 20 per cent – much less than YouTube – and the rest goes to the ‘performers’.
It is unlike Instagram or other social media sites in that nothing is suggested – instead, you have to search for, and then subscribe to, individual accounts to see much more than profile pictures.
Which is a good thing, because while some of the content is anodyne, much is highly sexual and many people on the site can bob freely from one to another. Perhaps a cookery hack one day, modelling new boots the next, then graduate to a few cheeky cleavage and bikini shots and more, as the money becomes more tempting.
Every week, it seems, we hear of someone who has made millions.
Last month it was announced that American influencer Corinna Kopf had retired from the site, aged 28, after making $67million (£53million). In her best month, she reportedly earned more than $2million (£1.6million).
Rapper Cardi B is said to earn more than $9million (£7.1million) a month from the site.
Meanwhile, Darcie Rattles was an out-of-work bricklayer with £6,000 in credit card bills and debts when she joined OnlyFans in 2022.
‘I was thinking: how the hell am I going to get to next week? How am I going to pay my credit cards?’ she says in an online interview. ‘I’m young, I’ve got a good body and I’ve got a lot of followers. It is what any girl would turn to. It had been in the back of mind for two years, but then I did it.’
Within two days of launching, she had earned enough to pay off her debts. Today, Darcie, who comes across as likeable, down-to-earth and has no qualms about what she shares, claims to earn more than £250,000 a year.
‘It doesn’t matter to me whether I get my feet out, or my other bits out,’ she says.
Though it does tend to be the other bits, because Darcie’s content promises very few clothes and, for those who pay extra, ‘a naughty side to me you’ve never seen before’.
But even Darcie seems like the girl next door compared to Lily Phillips, a British model who earned £2,000 in her first 24 hours on the site and recently went viral for sleeping with 101 men over a 14-hour period. She has since announced she is planning to set a record of having sex with 1,000 men in 24 hours.
And Bonnie Blue, a beautiful blonde with a golden tan and astonishingly white teeth, who has worked her way round Derby, Nottingham, Cancun and Australia, sleeping with university students.
On one night during Nottingham Trent freshers’ week – after publicising her stunt by wearing a sandwich board that read: ‘Bonk me for free and let me film it’ – she had boys queuing up from 6pm until five in the morning.
‘I got through them all,’ she said proudly in one interview in which she reminds us that, thanks to OnlyFans, she has already banked more than £3 million – for which she was applauded by her followers for her entrepreneurship.
But all that is chicken feed when you consider the £370 million dividend that company owner paid himself last year.
And these days that’s Leonid Radvinsky, who bought a majority stake from Tim Stokely in 2018, two years after he started the business with the help of a loan from his father.
It was the Covid-era lockdowns that thrust OnlyFans into the stratosphere. Everyone shut up at home, nothing to do. In 2020, it generated revenues of $2.23billion (£1.8billion). By 2021, it was up to $4.8billion (£3.8billion). There was a brief hiatus in October of that year when they tried banning sexually explicit content but that lasted about ten minutes before they switched back.
There have been plenty of scandals along the way. A BBC investigation back in 2021 revealed that children were not just accessing the material online by foxing the age verification process but were also selling explicit videos on the website. Leah, 17, had used a fake driving licence to set up an OnlyFans account where she made £5,000 uploading revealing videos of herself.
There have also been claims of OnlyFans creators using public gyms and spaces to make adult content.
Recently there has been more concerns that the company is not doing enough to protect minors.
OnlyFans, however, prefers to portray itself as a force for good, with supporters arguing that it empowers people by allowing them to sell content – over which they have full control – directly to consumers. And many of the Gen Z generation seem to agree. ‘It’s fine. It’s empowering. It’s taking control,’ they cry, pointing out that the site has loads of moderators and a tight security system to ensure that all users are over 18.
And they say, anyway, that OnlyFans isn’t just about sex.
Of course, they’re right. It has long been awash with pneumatic reality TV stars and the likes of Lottie Moss, Kerry Katona and Katie Price, who are happy to tease their followers with a few cheeky peeks in skimpy bikinis.
I spend an afternoon browsing the site and, while it is not all ‘spicy’ content as the company executives like to call it, everything is dripping with sauce and promise.
The big lips, the push-up bras, even the way a pretty Spanish chef is holding her paella pan. Company executives have been pushing hard to make the platform more mainstream – offering contracts and financial incentives to encourage musicians, sports stars, cooks, anyone really, to come on and share a bit of exclusive – or niche – content.
Really, anything that people will pay to look at – glimpses backstage at concerts. Celebrities in the bath.
During the 2024 Olympic Games, a raft of athletes jumped on the OnlyFans bandwagon to share pictures of their beautifully toned bodies.
Along with Jack Laugher, Team NZ rower Robbie Manson uses the site to share ‘exclusive content that tastefully explores the boundaries, including artistic portrayals of nudity’ for $14.99 a month. British speedskater
Elise Christie turned to the site when she found herself in financial difficulties.
All of which seems to be working well for them, but it can be rather murkier for others.
Not least because, in less than a decade, OnlyFans has spawned an entire support industry of ‘sugar daddies’ who support performers financially and ‘chatters’ who work for them. ‘Sugar daddies’ tend to be older male businessmen who ‘invest’ in promising creatives. In what are referred to rather murkily as ‘mutually beneficial deals’, they invest in branding and marketing and videography to boost traffic.
Chatters are different. For the real stars, the traffic is so high and the interaction with followers so demanding that if they had to do it all themselves, there’s no way they would ever have time to put their pyjamas back on.
So ‘chatters’ – a sort of online 21st-century Cyrano de Bergerac – do that for them. Keeping them engaged, online, needy and most of all, spending, spending, spending for more and more content.
Which means, of course, that the whole thing is a total scam. The poor daft subscriber thinks he’s really making a connection with ‘Racy Tracey from Twickenham’, but is more likely chatting to a middle-aged father of three from the Philippines.
He will have learnt everything about Tracey – her favourite colour, favourite animal and favourite position – have studied a script that reminds him ‘it’s all about selling, selling, selling’, and will be being paid $4 an hour for his efforts. Or the subscriber could just be talking to an AI bot – which perhaps is more appealing.
Chatters can be dangerous. As Alanya, a paralegal from Scotland, discovered when she learned that one of her most enthusiastic followers had travelled to her home town to find her, encouraged by her chatter.
‘My chatter told him that I loved him. I would never, ever have said that,’ she said.
But, sadly, chatters, sugar daddies and stalkers are not a problem for most creatives. Almost all of whom are still struggling to make any proper money, however many clothes they take off.
They will never know the clout of Cardi B, or Lily Allen, or former Disney child star Bella Thorne, who famously made a record- breaking $1million (£800,000) in 24 hours when she joined in August 2020. (Though initially there was some confusion as to whether she would be appearing nude or not. She did not – which caused quite a rumpus.)
Because, unlike celebrities who can redirect their existing social media followers to their OnlyFans accounts, most people find it hard to grab attention without doing something, well, grabby.
So, despite all the tales of golden riches, the average earnings of an OnlyFans creative is still just $150 (£118) a month and, with the market now so flooded, is only likely to go one way.
And it’s easy to see how, if you’re a young woman who has convinced yourself that you’re in control, empowered and mistress of your own destiny, you could find yourself moving inevitably and inexorably up (or perhaps down) the scale, revealing more and more.
Until, before you know it, like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, you’ve kept nothing back for yourself.
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