My time inside an OnlyFans "farm" earning $10 million a year
I went somewhere in Florida to see firsthand how the "spicy"-content business is changing the web, and the lives of the young people running it.
Free to read: Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream
OnlyFans, the subscription platform famous for its amateur-porn creators, is for many people a tabloid punchline: a place where young women post photos or videos of themselves because they don’t make enough money working as teachers, nurses and cops.
But it deserves to be taken seriously as a business. More than 3 million people now work as OnlyFans creators, and their sales exploded from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year. If they all worked together, they’d be one of America’s biggest private companies, larger than Neiman Marcus Group or Hallmark Cards.
I wanted to understand how this industry worked and why so many women and men were baring it all. So I interviewed adult-content creators and traveled to the Florida compound of Bryce Adams, one of the platform’s best-paid stars. What I found totally surprised me. Their content-making operation runs like a machine, with two dozen employees and a workflow rivaling more traditional media outfits.
Their success in “spicy” content raises some tough questions on how we think about sex, intimacy and social media, especially for young people who see online influencing as a lifelong career path. One 20-year-old said she made $150,000 in two months from OnlyFans and had lost all interest in what she’d once wanted to become, an obstetrician.
“This is normal for my generation, you know?” she told me. “I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”
The story’s online now.
Deleted scenes:
When a team of four researchers in the U.S. and Germany interviewed nearly two dozen OnlyFans creators last year for a study — “‘Nudes? Shouldn’t I Charge for These?’: Motivations of New Sexual Content Creators on OnlyFans” — many said they started using it as a financial lifeline during the pandemic and grew to enjoy the autonomy and flexible hours. One said she started her account after she was fired for leaving her computer too much to care for her ill mother. Another, a former Uber driver, said she felt safer not having to pick up strangers in her car. Some felt exhausted by the relentless fan negotiations and self-promotion, but others said they felt freer than they ever had in the workplace: no more listening to managers, jockeying for shifts or fighting for good customer reviews. One former waitress said she just used the same people-pleasing skills she’d learned at the restaurant: “No one’s always friendly 100 percent of the time.”
There is a strange parasocial dynamic to the work, and it cuts both ways. Avery said, in moments when she feels insecure, she’ll “go on OnlyFans and someone will be like, 'You're the most beautiful girl in the world.'" When she told her fans she'd be offline for two weeks due to a surgery, "the amount of 'hope you feel better,' 'sending prayers to you' was just insane," she told me. "I could post a TikTok right now and I don't think half of my friends would say that."
Some OnlyFans creators work with contract agencies in the Philippines that offer chatters as a service and promote their “certified upsell” strategies. Bryce's chatters work in-house, earning between $15 to $19 an hour with the expectation they’ll send at least 250 messages a day. Most supplement their income through personal OnlyFans accounts. (Ezra Marcus last year went into detail on the industry’s "ghostwriters.”)
You have to see:
The great Whitney Leaming shot an amazing video showing a day on the Bryce compound. My favorite scenes include the moms in the kitchen and the STD tests.
The Post’s star designer Emma Kumer created not only the gorgeous visual touches of our creator economy project, but cartoon maps for Bryce’s farm and MrBeast’s Greenville. Genius.
My goal with this was not to write a moralistic story. My favorite reads offer no easy answers, but make us think. I’d love to hear your questions, or how you think it could’ve been better. Email me at drew.harwell@proton.me or find me at Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads.