More than one in six young British adults has thought about posting on OnlyFans or a similar site. According to The Telegraph‘s Charles Hymas, a new Centre for Social Justice report finds that 18.1 percent of people aged 18 to 34 — about 2.7 million people — have considered uploading their own content in the past year.

The Daily Mail reported the same polling, describing it as more than 18 percent of that age group, or nearly three million people. The figures come from The Relationship Recession: Pornography, published by the CSJ, a Westminster think tank set up by former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.

What the survey asked

The CSJ commissioned Whitestone, a British Polling Council member, to survey 2,106 UK adults online on October 26 and 27, 2026. The sample was weighted to represent all adults, and the 18.1 percent figure applies to respondents aged 18 to 34. Using Office for National Statistics population estimates, the report calculates that share at 2,724,554 people.

A highlighted finding in the same document puts a related number slightly differently: 17 percent of people aged 18 to 30 said they had considered uploading to OnlyFans or a similar site to make money in the past year. Across all ages, about 9 percent said they had considered OnlyFans.

The poll measured consideration, not how many people actually opened an account or posted.

How the report describes OnlyFans

The CSJ report says a combined £5.4 billion was spent on OnlyFans in 2024. Citing industry trackers, it says the number of creators has grown fourteenfold since 2019, from under 350,000 to more than 5 million. Creators keep 80 percent of subscriptions, tips, and pay-per-view fees, with the platform taking 20 percent.

Those same cited figures sketch a steep earnings pyramid. The report says the average OnlyFans creator makes about £97 a month, while the top 1 percent average about £3,000 a month. It also says 84 percent of creators were women and 86 percent were between 18 and 24, while men made up about 87 percent of the audience.

The “relationship recession” argument

The OnlyFans finding sits inside a broader CSJ project the think tank calls a “relationship recession.” Hymas wrote that the group claims a “chasm” is opening between young men and young women, pointing to falling marriage rates, later marriages, less sexual activity and fertility, and higher anxiety among people under 30.

The report repeats a CSJ calculation that as a young man approaches 25, he is 26 times more likely to live with his mother than with a wife, and that England and Wales now have about 3.7 million fewer married people under 30 than in 1976 — down from about 4.5 million to roughly 790,000. The Daily Mail added that the report treats the spread of explicit content as a key driver, alongside the cost of living and high youth unemployment.

On pornography use more broadly, the Whitestone poll found that 47 percent of adults have never talked with any partner about whether either of them uses it, and only 16 percent have had that conversation in the past year. Twenty-seven percent of men said they watch several times a week or more, compared with 5 percent of women. Two-thirds of 18- to 24-year-olds — 70 percent of women and 62 percent of men in that age group — said the widespread availability of pornography is bad for men and is undermining relationships between the sexes.

The report itself cautions that in most of the trends it reviews, “the evidence establishes an association rather than direct causation.” It still argues that pornography is now common enough among younger people that even small effects matter when they show up across millions of lives — a line the Daily Mail also highlighted.

Among the report’s recommendations, Hymas noted proposals to have GPs ask about pornography use in sexual health consultations and to widen access to addiction support.

The takeaway

A large share of young British adults has at least thought about posting on OnlyFans, and that fact is now part of a national debate about work, dating, and porn. The same report’s cited earnings suggest the typical creator is not getting rich: about £97 a month on average, with a thin top slice doing much better. The poll asked what people have considered, not what they have earned. For anyone weighing the platform as a side hustle, that gap between interest and typical pay is the number worth sitting with.

Image: The City of London seen from the Millennium Bridge, photo by domdomegg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).