The elusive world of OnlyFans is filled with success stories as creators boast about the millions they’ve made after quitting their day job and committing to full-time content.
But – peel the layers back – and you might see that beyond a sultry photoshoot of what a subscriber considers to be a beautiful woman they’re paying hundreds for attention from is actually a 27-year-old man in Venezuela.
MailOnline looked into the murky underground world of OF ‘chatters’ – anonymous employees taken on by agencies to carry out conversations with clients.
From satisfying online fantasies via suggestive dialogue to simply sending heartening messages of support, staff are hired for work – usually making a measly $5 an hour or so and often balancing other part-time work.
Speaking to FEMAIL, Brendan Koerner – contributing editor at Wired who once went undercover to try find work as an OF chatter for a piece – said these workers are an essential part of the ‘business model’.
Google ‘OnlyFans management’ and dozens of companies come up, promising creators help ‘fulfill their potential and conquer the world of men’.
The Bunny Agency for instance boasts of their dedication to ‘getting their models into the top 0.5% of Creators to earn five & six figures a month’, with case studies flaunting their ‘chat team’ and ‘secret marketing methods’.
Elsewhere another Amar Agency has ‘a team of experts that are specialized on the chatting with fans’.
‘That doesn’t only bring you tons of money, but also gives you way more free time,’ the website promised.
Banx Management meanwhile says: ‘Transform your OnlyFans direct messaging into a relentless revenue-generating machine with our 24/7 Chatting Profit Maximization Service.
‘Banx Management introduces a groundbreaking approach to monetization – where our expert sales team takes the helm of your direct messages, driving content engagement and sales around the clock.
‘Imagine earnings multiplying even as you sleep, setting a new standard for passive income in the digital content realm.’
However, information on where and how ‘chatters’ are sourced is less straightforward.
Brendan revealed it took him six to eight weeks to find work, trawling through Reddit and online forums to find clarity on how the process works and what employers are looking for.
‘I initially thought it would be more of like a literary job or something where you know, the primary skill they were looking for is writing,’ he said.
‘And in fact, what they’re really looking for is salesmanship. The whole economy really depends on chatters being able to sell exclusive content to subscribers.
‘So basically additional content on top of what they already obtain through their monthly subscription fee.
‘I eventually went through a lot of rigmarole, got a job working for a German agency as a chatter.’
Brendan said it was ‘a lot more difficult than it than he thought it would be’ to secure work – as most tended to not want candidates from nations like the United States or the UK.
‘I think what’s important to point out is that most of the chatters are people who reside in low wage countries,’ he said.
‘And so the economics of it – obviously, I live in the US – $4 an hour is below our national minimum wage. So that’s that’s not really enough to, you know, exist here essentially, but a lot of chatters are based in places like the Philippines, Venezuela, Colombia.
‘One chatter I spoke to is based in Argentina. So the the money goes a little farther in those places, and it’s a job you can do from home. You have flexible hours.
‘This Argentinian chatter, for example, she was a college student and also worked in a pizzeria, and then she would come home and and do a shift from like 10pm to like 6am on OnlyFans.’
However, while there’s certainly flexibility there is also a myriad of ‘abuses in the industry towards chatters’, Brendan expressed.
‘This is something that came across in my conversations, especially with Filipino chatters,’ he said.
‘People that get ghosted… Basically, they don’t get paid, they’re made to do extremely long tryouts or additions. And then they’re like, not hired officially.
‘But they’ve given away a lot of free labor, and there’s obviously no unionization of labor in this space. So, yeah, chatters are certainly working at a power disadvantage.’
However, Brendan also dismissed the ‘old saw’ that the clients chatting with what they thought were gorgeous young women would in actuality be middle-aged men in another continent.
He said that both age and gender varied when it came to chatters.
‘I would say most of the people were generally in the age ranges of, let’s say, like 19 to 26 or 28,’ he revealed.
‘I did run into maybe one person who was a little bit older than that who actually resided in the UK. But you know, generally it was younger people.
‘It was oftentimes people who lived in countries where they had learned incredibly good English in the school or the university system but maybe English wasn’t their their first language.
‘People that reside in low wage countries that have really strong command of English are obviously at a great advantage in the competitive marketplace to be hired for these jobs.’
He said that it’s ‘tough’ to give an exact percentage of how many women undertook the work, but ‘it certainly wasn’t all men’.
Brendan said there is ‘certainly money to be made’ in the work, despite the whirlwind it took him to land employment for his story, which ended up being a four-month process from looking to doing the shifts.
‘I didn’t end up receiving any money – obviously that would be unethical for me to be paid, so anything that were made were donated – but in my chatting job, I believe the pay was $4 an hour was my starting pay and I didn’t initially start on commission,’ he said.
‘I think the promise was that if I stick with the job I could work my way up to a higher base pay and commission. At the end of the piece I was interviewing, and pretty close to landing a job with a much bigger agency and I believe there I think their base pay was $5 an hour, but I think there was either a half percent or 1% commission on all sales.’
In his Wired piece, Brendan reflected on how he struggled with the ethics of the chatting world – not just on the side of the people seeking work but the clients who believe they are having a private conversation with a woman, and oftentimes sending explicit photos they believe will be for her eyes only.
‘I worried that if I lingered in the chatting world for much longer, I’d be forced to lose something that so many of us have struggled to retain: the ability to empathize with people we know only through words on a screen,’ he wrote.
And speaking with FEMAIL, he spoke about the strange salesman-esque etiquette chatters are honed to employ.
For instance, what happens if they ask for a spicy photo in return to the nude pic they sent?
‘Well, they ask for content, but they have to pay for it. You don’t really get freebies unless you’re a proven spender right?,’ he revealed.
‘You know, we see in the software interface, we see how much you spent in the past.
‘And there’s notes about how freely you spend. If you’re a good spender I might take something out of the vault and send you like a clothed tease – but only if you’re a big spender.
‘You lose that privilege, I guess, if you’re not spending enough money, but generally, if you want extra content, you have to pay for it.’
He added that the chatters kept everything in notes files to make sure they understood the client better.
‘Obviously, people send explicit photos to the chatters all the time. And I don’t think that’s gonna change. I think that’s really important to some of these these clients that they do that for whatever reason.
‘So I I haven’t seen that discussed of like “oh, we need to change the the privacy of the settings of this”.
‘You send like a an explicit photo to a chatter and of course they might put it on a server that ends up on the Internet somewhere.
‘Next thing, you don’t even know, but your explicit photo is on like a pornographic website that’s being run out of another country.
‘I haven’t seen any real agitation for if that happens. But I haven’t seen anyone discussing about ways to solve that issue, I guess.’
Chatters are also given ‘dossiers’ on the creator to ensure that clients are none the wiser.
‘You don’t want people to realize that you are impersonating the person.
‘So you want to make sure all your chatters are on the same page about what music the Creator likes, what food she likes, what she likes to do in her spare time, what words she never uses, what her punctuation and capitalization quirks are, etc.’
Brendan admitted that the experience was ‘strange’ – as it demanded the skills and open prowess of a salesman in a deeply intimate and secrecy-shrouded industry.
‘I’m a naturally kind of chatty person. I like talking to people so I feel like engaging people and conversations just about you know what their day was like,’ he admitted.
‘Trying to just have casual conversation and make them feel less alone. I mean, that was pretty natural for me.’
However, the ‘sexual nature’ which included ‘catering to fantasies so these customers can have sexual gratification’ was more challenging.
‘And knowing I’m doing it in someone else’s guise. So that was, I wouldn’t say it was difficult. It was just kind of bizarre,’ he recounted.
‘I think it was sort of disorienting, but I mean, ultimately it was all kind of predictable, and not that tough to navigate.’
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