Is it a platform for emancipation, or is it a dangerous tool that objectifies women and destroys futures?
In this episode, we'll explore the complex history of OnlyFans, the world's number one "adult creator" platform.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about OnlyFans.
[00:00:24] To some, it is a tool for emancipation, allowing people to launch their own businesses and control their destiny.
[00:00:32] To others, it taps into the worst of human nature, forcing young people to wreck their future in the hope of making a quick buck today.
[00:00:41] Now, I should probably add a little disclaimer that we are going to be talking about an adult website today, so if you hadn’t realised that by now and you would prefer not to listen to this, then now is your time to press pause.
[00:00:53] Ok then, let’s talk about OnlyFans.
[00:00:59] If you have never heard of OnlyFans, and you are wondering what it is, your first port of call might be to go to the website www.onlyfans.com.
[00:01:11] On the homepage, you would see the text “Sign up to support your favourite creators”.
[00:01:16] Hmm, I’m still not so clear on what this is, you might be thinking.
[00:01:21] So, you might click around a bit more.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you’d go to the “About” page, where you’d find the text “OnlyFans is the 18+ subscription platform empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans.”
[00:01:39] End quote.
[00:01:40] OK, 18+, so you probably realise that there is an adult, most likely sexual nature to this, but “empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans”, well this sounds quite a lot like corporate jargon, it doesn’t exactly give away that much.
[00:02:03] You might scroll down and read that “As a creator first platform - our creator community is at the heart of everything we do.”
[00:02:10] More corporate jargon, so you keep reading.
[00:02:13] “We are committed to building the safest social media platform in the world.”, “We are an inclusive platform, home to a diverse range of content creators.”
[00:02:22] Still, it might not be particularly clear, but you wouldn’t have to click very far from the homepage before you will be confronted by suggestive content.
[00:02:33] And then it will hit you.
[00:02:36] It is a website where you can pay to see pictures and videos of people, mainly women, and mostly women not wearing many if any clothes.
[00:02:46] Now, there might not be anything extraordinary about this. The internet is full of pornography, with estimates of exactly how much ranging from 4% to 30% of the entire internet being sexually explicit content.
[00:03:01] In other words, porn.
[00:03:04] There is nothing in itself remarkable about a website where people can watch naked videos of other people, but there is something remarkable about OnlyFans.
[00:03:15] In our last episode, one of our member-only ones, we learned about the life of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate.
[00:03:23] Hefner built a large and successful business on sex, and the sexualisation of women, but he was a gatekeeper. He chose who to put in the magazine, and on the front cover.
[00:03:37] It wasn’t like anyone could just turn up at the Playboy offices, declare that they were ready to take off their clothes and be put on the front cover. For better or for worse, they had to look a certain way, and had to play by Playboy’s rules.
[00:03:53] OnlyFans is a very different proposition.
[00:03:57] Anyone can, if they so desire, create their own page on OnlyFans; there is no gatekeeper.
[00:04:05] These become the “content creators” you heard about in the corporate jargon spiel I read you at the start.
[00:04:12] And anyone can “subscribe” to them, which might unlock extra photos or videos, or allow them to message the creator directly.
[00:04:21] They can be tipped, like a bartender.
[00:04:24] Or, dare I say, like a stripper.
[00:04:27] The amounts are generally relatively small, a few dollars.
[00:04:31] But they add up.
[00:04:34] And some of the most successful “creators” on OnlyFans make a vast amount of money, we are talking about millions of dollars a month in some cases.
[00:04:43] It has made some people fabulously wealthy, and the media is full of stories about young people, typically young women, who have in many cases given up promising careers to focus on an OnlyFans, where they have managed to attract a dedicated following and earn an enviable living, making far more money than they would have done in their previous 9-5 job.
[00:05:08] It is, in many ways, an attractive proposition.
[00:05:12] You can be your own boss, decide how much to work and when to work.
[00:05:17] There is no commuting, no sitting in your car or waiting for the bus to go to a boring 9-5 in a dull office.
[00:05:25] All you need is a mobile phone and access to the internet, and you can make a living from anywhere in the world.
[00:05:34] Well, that’s not quite all of course.
[00:05:37] You also need to upload content that people are prepared to pay for, and this is where things take something of a darker turn.
[00:05:45] The content that people are prepared to pay the most for is, surprise surprise, sexually explicit content.
[00:05:53] Naked pictures, sexual videos, and so on.
[00:05:57] Sure, there are some exceptions, but as the “18+ reference” in the corporate jargon at the start hinted at, OnlyFans is first and foremost a site that allows women to sell sexually explicit content.
[00:06:12] Or to put it another way, it is a site that allows men to pay random women on the internet for sexually explicit content.
[00:06:21] It was founded in 2016, one year before Hugh Hefner’s death, by a British entrepreneur with a background in softcore pornography, creating cam sites and websites where people could request personalised videos from adult models.
[00:06:37] The entrepreneur saw what might seem obvious to anyone now. People will happily pay other people directly for their sexually explicit videos, they don’t need to go through a gatekeeper like Hugh Hefner or a porn studio.
[00:06:53] OnlyFans was happy to facilitate the transaction, for a fee, of course.
[00:06:58] It takes a 20% cut of every transaction, so for every $10 a creator is paid by one of their subscribers, they get $8 and the remaining $2 goes to OnlyFans as a cost of facilitating the service.
[00:07:15] It is a simple business model, but it is devilishly effective.
[00:07:22] After it was launched, the website got off to a relatively slow start, but it was handed a gift in the form of the COVID pandemic, where a reported 200,000 new people were signing up to it every single day.
[00:07:39] Suddenly, lockdowns forced people into their homes. Clearly, this was problematic for all manner of occupations, but the adult industry was particularly widely hit.
[00:07:51] Strippers, porn stars, glamour models and so on, they were all unable to work.
[00:07:57] With limited means of earning a living, these kinds of people turned to OnlyFans.
[00:08:04] After all, it was not much different from what they were doing before.
[00:08:08] In fact, it was easier.
[00:08:11] You just needed to take a few photos or videos, and people from all over the world could subscribe to your content, send you money, become your “fans”.
[00:08:23] And even though 20% might seem like a lot, it was a lot less than might be taken in other places, like in strip clubs, which often force the stripper to pay to work there, and can take 50% of her earnings.
[00:08:39] What’s more, it scaled indefinitely, so there was no limit to the amount of money someone could earn.
[00:08:46] For a stripper to earn $10,000 let’s say, that person would have to do $10,000 worth of dances. I am not a stripper, but that sounds like a lot of work to me.
[00:08:59] For a stripper to earn $10,000 on OnlyFans, they could find that they could earn that in a week or even a day, and it would be no more work than earning $1,000 or even $10. They didn’t need to strip more, they uploaded the same amount of content, they just needed more people to subscribe to it.
[00:09:20] And as you heard, with 200,000 people signing up every single day, often people bored at home with money burning a hole in their pocket, there was more than enough demand.
[00:09:32] Understandably, for the content creators, it was an attractive proposition, and the stories about the eye-watering amounts of money earned by some people on OnlyFans attracted people who had never previously done anything like this to the platform.
[00:09:48] This previously unknown British website became part of mainstream culture, referenced even in a song by Beyoncé.
[00:09:57] Now, for the record, I should add that OnlyFans isn’t only sexually explicit content of naked women. There is also sexually explicit content provided by men, although men only make up 30% of the “content creators”, but, as you might imagine, 70% of the people paying for content.
[00:10:18] There is also content that isn’t exactly sexually explicit, but is still content of a sexual nature.
[00:10:26] For example, there was a story back in 2021 of a Canadian plumber who packed it all in, he quit his day job, to go on OnlyFans, where he has made over a million dollars primarily selling pictures of his feet.
[00:10:42] There is even content that isn’t sexually explicit at all. There are food influencers, travel reviewers, all sorts of people who use OnlyFans as a way to connect directly with their fans, and be rewarded for the content they create, but they tend to be much less popular and much worse paid than the people who are prepared to bare all.
[00:11:07] After all, sex sells.
[00:11:10] But in August of 2021, OnlyFans shocked its users by announcing that it was going to ban all sexual content.
[00:11:19] There was a huge uproar from its community, and after much toing and froing, the decision was reversed a mere six days later.
[00:11:28] In fact, there is an interesting backstory as to why this happened, it’s too long to go into here, but if you are interested in it you can listen to episode number 376, where we talk about the relationship between the world of finance and the world of porn.
[00:11:44] Now, back to our story. It would be remiss of me perhaps to not make any kind of link between OnlyFans and the membership we have for this podcast, and for Leonardo English.
[00:11:56] In case you hadn’t realised, we have a membership that allows people to subscribe for a mixture of bonus content and learning materials, like interactive transcripts and advanced vocabulary, as well as support the work that my small team and I do, exactly like an OnlyFans.
[00:12:14] Of course, there are no nudes or suggestive pictures involved, and it is my understanding that people become members for slightly different reasons to the reason someone might subscribe to an OnlyFans account, but there are some parallels between what I am doing and what is done by the good ladies of OnlyFans.
[00:12:34] And although some critics might say, “well, the “content creators” of OnlyFans are just taking off their clothes off, it’s hardly work”, in the interviews I went through when researching this episode, for the most successful people on the platform, it does seem like a demanding and most certainly full-time job.
[00:12:54] There is the preparing for the photoshoots, choosing the pictures, messaging fans, creating images and videos. Many are putting in 12 hour days, and then waking up to dozens of messages from fans, requests for new videos, and so on.
[00:13:10] Like many things, perhaps it sounds glamorous and wonderful to be sought after by so many strangers all over the world, but the reality is that it can be hard and serious work.
[00:13:23] Or perhaps it doesn’t sound glamorous at all.
[00:13:26] For most of the creators on OnlyFans, despite the fact that they are called “creators” or “entrepreneurs”, it is, at the end of the day, sex work, and comes with many of the same difficulties as “traditional” sex work.
[00:13:41] According to one recent survey, 50% of adult content creators on OnlyFans admitted that it has negatively impacted their personal life, ruining relationships and meaning that they have trouble finding a partner.
[00:13:55] Now, perhaps you are hearing this and thinking, “well, obviously, I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was selling naked pictures of themself to strangers on the internet”.
[00:14:06] Or perhaps you’re listening and thinking, “people are so closed minded, OnlyFans is a powerful way for women who might otherwise be exploited to be their own boss”.
[00:14:17] Whatever side you fall down on, clearly having an OnlyFans is becoming a more and more acceptable thing for a person to do, and a more acceptable thing for people to subscribe to.
[00:14:29] To be precise, according to the OnlyFans financial accounts from 2022, the platform now has over 3 million “creators” and going on 250 million “fans”.
[00:14:42] And it makes bucketloads of money. $5.5 billion was spent on the site in 2022, meaning the 20% cut the company takes was worth $1.1 billion.
[00:14:57] It is a huge business, and it’s one that is changing society.
[00:15:02] These are 3 million people selling predominantly explicit content on the internet, many of whom would never have done it before, but have been lured in by the promise of making tens of thousands of dollars a month.
[00:15:16] Yes, an OnlyFans account, and its associated content can be deleted at any time, but there are ways that people can take screenshots and make copies of the content, which will exist…well, forever.
[00:15:32] According to some of the greatest critics of the platform, millions of people, predominantly young people and predominantly young women, are simply unaware or in denial about what damage they may be doing to their future prospects in exchange for a quick buck today.
[00:15:50] And for most, they really aren’t making that much money at all.
[00:15:55] For all of the stories of people making millions of dollars a year by sharing some intimate pictures and engaging with fans, according to one report there are only 300 creators who earn more than a million dollars a year.
[00:16:10] The average creator on OnlyFans, according to the same report, only has 21 paying subscribers and earns $180 a month.
[00:16:21] Of course, $180 is still $180, and especially in countries with weaker currencies that can go a long way.
[00:16:30] But in places like the United States or the United Kingdom, where $180 a month really isn’t all that much, it begs the question of whether it really is worth it.
[00:16:41] Is it worth a future boss, colleague, partner or family member finding out about your OnlyFans account and seeing your intimate photos only to make enough money to cover your electricity bill?
[00:16:55] Maybe it is, and for some creators it is about more than just making money; it’s about what the money brings.
[00:17:03] For the most successful creators on OnlyFans, it has changed their lives, allowing them to become spectacularly wealthy and more importantly, in control of their own destiny.
[00:17:14] You could say that they get trapped on a hamster wheel of content creation, constantly having to share new pictures and videos in order to retain their fans and reel in new ones, but they are free to quit at any time.
[00:17:29] For the women who switched from traditional sex work to OnlyFans, women who were strippers or porn stars, it has allowed them to take what they were doing anyway and monetise it in a much more effective and safer way, without manipulative male bosses or producers getting between them and the people who want to consume their content, and without being harassed by seedy men in nightclubs or hotel rooms.
[00:17:55] But for everyone else, the impact is less clear.
[00:18:00] And we’ve been talking primarily about the content creator side of things so far, the principally female content creators sharing their explicit content with their fans.
[00:18:11] We haven’t really talked about the people paying for it, the predominantly male audience that spent over $5 billion paying for nude content in 2022.
[00:18:23] Of course, men being able to pay to access some sort of sexual content is nothing new, whether we’re talking about prostitution in Pompeii or someone in the 1960s reading Playboy magazine.
[00:18:36] But the scale and the ease with which someone can access personalised sexual content on OnlyFans is something new and unparalleled. You can sign up in minutes, subscribe to unlock explicit content of a stranger on the internet, send them messages, and video requests. And all for just a few dollars.
[00:18:57] So, how does this affect the men who use it?
[00:19:02] Well, there are fears about how this might damage a man’s ability to be intimate with someone in real life, and how it will alter expectations about how a partner should behave.
[00:19:13] If a young man grows up being able to request personalised sexual content at the tap of a button, having his choice of 3 million different people of all shapes, sizes, and personalities, and being able to chat with any of them anonymously, for a fee of course, how will this affect his ability to exist in the real world, how will it affect his ability to have a relationship with a real woman, or with a real man for that matter?
[00:19:42] It is a big unknown, and to its biggest critics OnlyFans is doing huge damage to society, it’s just happening slowly, so like a frog in boiling water, we won’t realise until it’s too late.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on OnlyFans.
[00:20:03] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:07] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:10] Do you think OnlyFans is a harmless platform enabling people to earn a decent living, or is it much more dangerous than people realise?
[00:20:18] Do you know anyone who has joined OnlyFans, and how has it impacted them?
[00:20:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about OnlyFans.
[00:00:24] To some, it is a tool for emancipation, allowing people to launch their own businesses and control their destiny.
[00:00:32] To others, it taps into the worst of human nature, forcing young people to wreck their future in the hope of making a quick buck today.
[00:00:41] Now, I should probably add a little disclaimer that we are going to be talking about an adult website today, so if you hadn’t realised that by now and you would prefer not to listen to this, then now is your time to press pause.
[00:00:53] Ok then, let’s talk about OnlyFans.
[00:00:59] If you have never heard of OnlyFans, and you are wondering what it is, your first port of call might be to go to the website www.onlyfans.com.
[00:01:11] On the homepage, you would see the text “Sign up to support your favourite creators”.
[00:01:16] Hmm, I’m still not so clear on what this is, you might be thinking.
[00:01:21] So, you might click around a bit more.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you’d go to the “About” page, where you’d find the text “OnlyFans is the 18+ subscription platform empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans.”
[00:01:39] End quote.
[00:01:40] OK, 18+, so you probably realise that there is an adult, most likely sexual nature to this, but “empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans”, well this sounds quite a lot like corporate jargon, it doesn’t exactly give away that much.
[00:02:03] You might scroll down and read that “As a creator first platform - our creator community is at the heart of everything we do.”
[00:02:10] More corporate jargon, so you keep reading.
[00:02:13] “We are committed to building the safest social media platform in the world.”, “We are an inclusive platform, home to a diverse range of content creators.”
[00:02:22] Still, it might not be particularly clear, but you wouldn’t have to click very far from the homepage before you will be confronted by suggestive content.
[00:02:33] And then it will hit you.
[00:02:36] It is a website where you can pay to see pictures and videos of people, mainly women, and mostly women not wearing many if any clothes.
[00:02:46] Now, there might not be anything extraordinary about this. The internet is full of pornography, with estimates of exactly how much ranging from 4% to 30% of the entire internet being sexually explicit content.
[00:03:01] In other words, porn.
[00:03:04] There is nothing in itself remarkable about a website where people can watch naked videos of other people, but there is something remarkable about OnlyFans.
[00:03:15] In our last episode, one of our member-only ones, we learned about the life of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate.
[00:03:23] Hefner built a large and successful business on sex, and the sexualisation of women, but he was a gatekeeper. He chose who to put in the magazine, and on the front cover.
[00:03:37] It wasn’t like anyone could just turn up at the Playboy offices, declare that they were ready to take off their clothes and be put on the front cover. For better or for worse, they had to look a certain way, and had to play by Playboy’s rules.
[00:03:53] OnlyFans is a very different proposition.
[00:03:57] Anyone can, if they so desire, create their own page on OnlyFans; there is no gatekeeper.
[00:04:05] These become the “content creators” you heard about in the corporate jargon spiel I read you at the start.
[00:04:12] And anyone can “subscribe” to them, which might unlock extra photos or videos, or allow them to message the creator directly.
[00:04:21] They can be tipped, like a bartender.
[00:04:24] Or, dare I say, like a stripper.
[00:04:27] The amounts are generally relatively small, a few dollars.
[00:04:31] But they add up.
[00:04:34] And some of the most successful “creators” on OnlyFans make a vast amount of money, we are talking about millions of dollars a month in some cases.
[00:04:43] It has made some people fabulously wealthy, and the media is full of stories about young people, typically young women, who have in many cases given up promising careers to focus on an OnlyFans, where they have managed to attract a dedicated following and earn an enviable living, making far more money than they would have done in their previous 9-5 job.
[00:05:08] It is, in many ways, an attractive proposition.
[00:05:12] You can be your own boss, decide how much to work and when to work.
[00:05:17] There is no commuting, no sitting in your car or waiting for the bus to go to a boring 9-5 in a dull office.
[00:05:25] All you need is a mobile phone and access to the internet, and you can make a living from anywhere in the world.
[00:05:34] Well, that’s not quite all of course.
[00:05:37] You also need to upload content that people are prepared to pay for, and this is where things take something of a darker turn.
[00:05:45] The content that people are prepared to pay the most for is, surprise surprise, sexually explicit content.
[00:05:53] Naked pictures, sexual videos, and so on.
[00:05:57] Sure, there are some exceptions, but as the “18+ reference” in the corporate jargon at the start hinted at, OnlyFans is first and foremost a site that allows women to sell sexually explicit content.
[00:06:12] Or to put it another way, it is a site that allows men to pay random women on the internet for sexually explicit content.
[00:06:21] It was founded in 2016, one year before Hugh Hefner’s death, by a British entrepreneur with a background in softcore pornography, creating cam sites and websites where people could request personalised videos from adult models.
[00:06:37] The entrepreneur saw what might seem obvious to anyone now. People will happily pay other people directly for their sexually explicit videos, they don’t need to go through a gatekeeper like Hugh Hefner or a porn studio.
[00:06:53] OnlyFans was happy to facilitate the transaction, for a fee, of course.
[00:06:58] It takes a 20% cut of every transaction, so for every $10 a creator is paid by one of their subscribers, they get $8 and the remaining $2 goes to OnlyFans as a cost of facilitating the service.
[00:07:15] It is a simple business model, but it is devilishly effective.
[00:07:22] After it was launched, the website got off to a relatively slow start, but it was handed a gift in the form of the COVID pandemic, where a reported 200,000 new people were signing up to it every single day.
[00:07:39] Suddenly, lockdowns forced people into their homes. Clearly, this was problematic for all manner of occupations, but the adult industry was particularly widely hit.
[00:07:51] Strippers, porn stars, glamour models and so on, they were all unable to work.
[00:07:57] With limited means of earning a living, these kinds of people turned to OnlyFans.
[00:08:04] After all, it was not much different from what they were doing before.
[00:08:08] In fact, it was easier.
[00:08:11] You just needed to take a few photos or videos, and people from all over the world could subscribe to your content, send you money, become your “fans”.
[00:08:23] And even though 20% might seem like a lot, it was a lot less than might be taken in other places, like in strip clubs, which often force the stripper to pay to work there, and can take 50% of her earnings.
[00:08:39] What’s more, it scaled indefinitely, so there was no limit to the amount of money someone could earn.
[00:08:46] For a stripper to earn $10,000 let’s say, that person would have to do $10,000 worth of dances. I am not a stripper, but that sounds like a lot of work to me.
[00:08:59] For a stripper to earn $10,000 on OnlyFans, they could find that they could earn that in a week or even a day, and it would be no more work than earning $1,000 or even $10. They didn’t need to strip more, they uploaded the same amount of content, they just needed more people to subscribe to it.
[00:09:20] And as you heard, with 200,000 people signing up every single day, often people bored at home with money burning a hole in their pocket, there was more than enough demand.
[00:09:32] Understandably, for the content creators, it was an attractive proposition, and the stories about the eye-watering amounts of money earned by some people on OnlyFans attracted people who had never previously done anything like this to the platform.
[00:09:48] This previously unknown British website became part of mainstream culture, referenced even in a song by Beyoncé.
[00:09:57] Now, for the record, I should add that OnlyFans isn’t only sexually explicit content of naked women. There is also sexually explicit content provided by men, although men only make up 30% of the “content creators”, but, as you might imagine, 70% of the people paying for content.
[00:10:18] There is also content that isn’t exactly sexually explicit, but is still content of a sexual nature.
[00:10:26] For example, there was a story back in 2021 of a Canadian plumber who packed it all in, he quit his day job, to go on OnlyFans, where he has made over a million dollars primarily selling pictures of his feet.
[00:10:42] There is even content that isn’t sexually explicit at all. There are food influencers, travel reviewers, all sorts of people who use OnlyFans as a way to connect directly with their fans, and be rewarded for the content they create, but they tend to be much less popular and much worse paid than the people who are prepared to bare all.
[00:11:07] After all, sex sells.
[00:11:10] But in August of 2021, OnlyFans shocked its users by announcing that it was going to ban all sexual content.
[00:11:19] There was a huge uproar from its community, and after much toing and froing, the decision was reversed a mere six days later.
[00:11:28] In fact, there is an interesting backstory as to why this happened, it’s too long to go into here, but if you are interested in it you can listen to episode number 376, where we talk about the relationship between the world of finance and the world of porn.
[00:11:44] Now, back to our story. It would be remiss of me perhaps to not make any kind of link between OnlyFans and the membership we have for this podcast, and for Leonardo English.
[00:11:56] In case you hadn’t realised, we have a membership that allows people to subscribe for a mixture of bonus content and learning materials, like interactive transcripts and advanced vocabulary, as well as support the work that my small team and I do, exactly like an OnlyFans.
[00:12:14] Of course, there are no nudes or suggestive pictures involved, and it is my understanding that people become members for slightly different reasons to the reason someone might subscribe to an OnlyFans account, but there are some parallels between what I am doing and what is done by the good ladies of OnlyFans.
[00:12:34] And although some critics might say, “well, the “content creators” of OnlyFans are just taking off their clothes off, it’s hardly work”, in the interviews I went through when researching this episode, for the most successful people on the platform, it does seem like a demanding and most certainly full-time job.
[00:12:54] There is the preparing for the photoshoots, choosing the pictures, messaging fans, creating images and videos. Many are putting in 12 hour days, and then waking up to dozens of messages from fans, requests for new videos, and so on.
[00:13:10] Like many things, perhaps it sounds glamorous and wonderful to be sought after by so many strangers all over the world, but the reality is that it can be hard and serious work.
[00:13:23] Or perhaps it doesn’t sound glamorous at all.
[00:13:26] For most of the creators on OnlyFans, despite the fact that they are called “creators” or “entrepreneurs”, it is, at the end of the day, sex work, and comes with many of the same difficulties as “traditional” sex work.
[00:13:41] According to one recent survey, 50% of adult content creators on OnlyFans admitted that it has negatively impacted their personal life, ruining relationships and meaning that they have trouble finding a partner.
[00:13:55] Now, perhaps you are hearing this and thinking, “well, obviously, I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was selling naked pictures of themself to strangers on the internet”.
[00:14:06] Or perhaps you’re listening and thinking, “people are so closed minded, OnlyFans is a powerful way for women who might otherwise be exploited to be their own boss”.
[00:14:17] Whatever side you fall down on, clearly having an OnlyFans is becoming a more and more acceptable thing for a person to do, and a more acceptable thing for people to subscribe to.
[00:14:29] To be precise, according to the OnlyFans financial accounts from 2022, the platform now has over 3 million “creators” and going on 250 million “fans”.
[00:14:42] And it makes bucketloads of money. $5.5 billion was spent on the site in 2022, meaning the 20% cut the company takes was worth $1.1 billion.
[00:14:57] It is a huge business, and it’s one that is changing society.
[00:15:02] These are 3 million people selling predominantly explicit content on the internet, many of whom would never have done it before, but have been lured in by the promise of making tens of thousands of dollars a month.
[00:15:16] Yes, an OnlyFans account, and its associated content can be deleted at any time, but there are ways that people can take screenshots and make copies of the content, which will exist…well, forever.
[00:15:32] According to some of the greatest critics of the platform, millions of people, predominantly young people and predominantly young women, are simply unaware or in denial about what damage they may be doing to their future prospects in exchange for a quick buck today.
[00:15:50] And for most, they really aren’t making that much money at all.
[00:15:55] For all of the stories of people making millions of dollars a year by sharing some intimate pictures and engaging with fans, according to one report there are only 300 creators who earn more than a million dollars a year.
[00:16:10] The average creator on OnlyFans, according to the same report, only has 21 paying subscribers and earns $180 a month.
[00:16:21] Of course, $180 is still $180, and especially in countries with weaker currencies that can go a long way.
[00:16:30] But in places like the United States or the United Kingdom, where $180 a month really isn’t all that much, it begs the question of whether it really is worth it.
[00:16:41] Is it worth a future boss, colleague, partner or family member finding out about your OnlyFans account and seeing your intimate photos only to make enough money to cover your electricity bill?
[00:16:55] Maybe it is, and for some creators it is about more than just making money; it’s about what the money brings.
[00:17:03] For the most successful creators on OnlyFans, it has changed their lives, allowing them to become spectacularly wealthy and more importantly, in control of their own destiny.
[00:17:14] You could say that they get trapped on a hamster wheel of content creation, constantly having to share new pictures and videos in order to retain their fans and reel in new ones, but they are free to quit at any time.
[00:17:29] For the women who switched from traditional sex work to OnlyFans, women who were strippers or porn stars, it has allowed them to take what they were doing anyway and monetise it in a much more effective and safer way, without manipulative male bosses or producers getting between them and the people who want to consume their content, and without being harassed by seedy men in nightclubs or hotel rooms.
[00:17:55] But for everyone else, the impact is less clear.
[00:18:00] And we’ve been talking primarily about the content creator side of things so far, the principally female content creators sharing their explicit content with their fans.
[00:18:11] We haven’t really talked about the people paying for it, the predominantly male audience that spent over $5 billion paying for nude content in 2022.
[00:18:23] Of course, men being able to pay to access some sort of sexual content is nothing new, whether we’re talking about prostitution in Pompeii or someone in the 1960s reading Playboy magazine.
[00:18:36] But the scale and the ease with which someone can access personalised sexual content on OnlyFans is something new and unparalleled. You can sign up in minutes, subscribe to unlock explicit content of a stranger on the internet, send them messages, and video requests. And all for just a few dollars.
[00:18:57] So, how does this affect the men who use it?
[00:19:02] Well, there are fears about how this might damage a man’s ability to be intimate with someone in real life, and how it will alter expectations about how a partner should behave.
[00:19:13] If a young man grows up being able to request personalised sexual content at the tap of a button, having his choice of 3 million different people of all shapes, sizes, and personalities, and being able to chat with any of them anonymously, for a fee of course, how will this affect his ability to exist in the real world, how will it affect his ability to have a relationship with a real woman, or with a real man for that matter?
[00:19:42] It is a big unknown, and to its biggest critics OnlyFans is doing huge damage to society, it’s just happening slowly, so like a frog in boiling water, we won’t realise until it’s too late.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on OnlyFans.
[00:20:03] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:07] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:10] Do you think OnlyFans is a harmless platform enabling people to earn a decent living, or is it much more dangerous than people realise?
[00:20:18] Do you know anyone who has joined OnlyFans, and how has it impacted them?
[00:20:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about OnlyFans.
[00:00:24] To some, it is a tool for emancipation, allowing people to launch their own businesses and control their destiny.
[00:00:32] To others, it taps into the worst of human nature, forcing young people to wreck their future in the hope of making a quick buck today.
[00:00:41] Now, I should probably add a little disclaimer that we are going to be talking about an adult website today, so if you hadn’t realised that by now and you would prefer not to listen to this, then now is your time to press pause.
[00:00:53] Ok then, let’s talk about OnlyFans.
[00:00:59] If you have never heard of OnlyFans, and you are wondering what it is, your first port of call might be to go to the website www.onlyfans.com.
[00:01:11] On the homepage, you would see the text “Sign up to support your favourite creators”.
[00:01:16] Hmm, I’m still not so clear on what this is, you might be thinking.
[00:01:21] So, you might click around a bit more.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you’d go to the “About” page, where you’d find the text “OnlyFans is the 18+ subscription platform empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans.”
[00:01:39] End quote.
[00:01:40] OK, 18+, so you probably realise that there is an adult, most likely sexual nature to this, but “empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans”, well this sounds quite a lot like corporate jargon, it doesn’t exactly give away that much.
[00:02:03] You might scroll down and read that “As a creator first platform - our creator community is at the heart of everything we do.”
[00:02:10] More corporate jargon, so you keep reading.
[00:02:13] “We are committed to building the safest social media platform in the world.”, “We are an inclusive platform, home to a diverse range of content creators.”
[00:02:22] Still, it might not be particularly clear, but you wouldn’t have to click very far from the homepage before you will be confronted by suggestive content.
[00:02:33] And then it will hit you.
[00:02:36] It is a website where you can pay to see pictures and videos of people, mainly women, and mostly women not wearing many if any clothes.
[00:02:46] Now, there might not be anything extraordinary about this. The internet is full of pornography, with estimates of exactly how much ranging from 4% to 30% of the entire internet being sexually explicit content.
[00:03:01] In other words, porn.
[00:03:04] There is nothing in itself remarkable about a website where people can watch naked videos of other people, but there is something remarkable about OnlyFans.
[00:03:15] In our last episode, one of our member-only ones, we learned about the life of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate.
[00:03:23] Hefner built a large and successful business on sex, and the sexualisation of women, but he was a gatekeeper. He chose who to put in the magazine, and on the front cover.
[00:03:37] It wasn’t like anyone could just turn up at the Playboy offices, declare that they were ready to take off their clothes and be put on the front cover. For better or for worse, they had to look a certain way, and had to play by Playboy’s rules.
[00:03:53] OnlyFans is a very different proposition.
[00:03:57] Anyone can, if they so desire, create their own page on OnlyFans; there is no gatekeeper.
[00:04:05] These become the “content creators” you heard about in the corporate jargon spiel I read you at the start.
[00:04:12] And anyone can “subscribe” to them, which might unlock extra photos or videos, or allow them to message the creator directly.
[00:04:21] They can be tipped, like a bartender.
[00:04:24] Or, dare I say, like a stripper.
[00:04:27] The amounts are generally relatively small, a few dollars.
[00:04:31] But they add up.
[00:04:34] And some of the most successful “creators” on OnlyFans make a vast amount of money, we are talking about millions of dollars a month in some cases.
[00:04:43] It has made some people fabulously wealthy, and the media is full of stories about young people, typically young women, who have in many cases given up promising careers to focus on an OnlyFans, where they have managed to attract a dedicated following and earn an enviable living, making far more money than they would have done in their previous 9-5 job.
[00:05:08] It is, in many ways, an attractive proposition.
[00:05:12] You can be your own boss, decide how much to work and when to work.
[00:05:17] There is no commuting, no sitting in your car or waiting for the bus to go to a boring 9-5 in a dull office.
[00:05:25] All you need is a mobile phone and access to the internet, and you can make a living from anywhere in the world.
[00:05:34] Well, that’s not quite all of course.
[00:05:37] You also need to upload content that people are prepared to pay for, and this is where things take something of a darker turn.
[00:05:45] The content that people are prepared to pay the most for is, surprise surprise, sexually explicit content.
[00:05:53] Naked pictures, sexual videos, and so on.
[00:05:57] Sure, there are some exceptions, but as the “18+ reference” in the corporate jargon at the start hinted at, OnlyFans is first and foremost a site that allows women to sell sexually explicit content.
[00:06:12] Or to put it another way, it is a site that allows men to pay random women on the internet for sexually explicit content.
[00:06:21] It was founded in 2016, one year before Hugh Hefner’s death, by a British entrepreneur with a background in softcore pornography, creating cam sites and websites where people could request personalised videos from adult models.
[00:06:37] The entrepreneur saw what might seem obvious to anyone now. People will happily pay other people directly for their sexually explicit videos, they don’t need to go through a gatekeeper like Hugh Hefner or a porn studio.
[00:06:53] OnlyFans was happy to facilitate the transaction, for a fee, of course.
[00:06:58] It takes a 20% cut of every transaction, so for every $10 a creator is paid by one of their subscribers, they get $8 and the remaining $2 goes to OnlyFans as a cost of facilitating the service.
[00:07:15] It is a simple business model, but it is devilishly effective.
[00:07:22] After it was launched, the website got off to a relatively slow start, but it was handed a gift in the form of the COVID pandemic, where a reported 200,000 new people were signing up to it every single day.
[00:07:39] Suddenly, lockdowns forced people into their homes. Clearly, this was problematic for all manner of occupations, but the adult industry was particularly widely hit.
[00:07:51] Strippers, porn stars, glamour models and so on, they were all unable to work.
[00:07:57] With limited means of earning a living, these kinds of people turned to OnlyFans.
[00:08:04] After all, it was not much different from what they were doing before.
[00:08:08] In fact, it was easier.
[00:08:11] You just needed to take a few photos or videos, and people from all over the world could subscribe to your content, send you money, become your “fans”.
[00:08:23] And even though 20% might seem like a lot, it was a lot less than might be taken in other places, like in strip clubs, which often force the stripper to pay to work there, and can take 50% of her earnings.
[00:08:39] What’s more, it scaled indefinitely, so there was no limit to the amount of money someone could earn.
[00:08:46] For a stripper to earn $10,000 let’s say, that person would have to do $10,000 worth of dances. I am not a stripper, but that sounds like a lot of work to me.
[00:08:59] For a stripper to earn $10,000 on OnlyFans, they could find that they could earn that in a week or even a day, and it would be no more work than earning $1,000 or even $10. They didn’t need to strip more, they uploaded the same amount of content, they just needed more people to subscribe to it.
[00:09:20] And as you heard, with 200,000 people signing up every single day, often people bored at home with money burning a hole in their pocket, there was more than enough demand.
[00:09:32] Understandably, for the content creators, it was an attractive proposition, and the stories about the eye-watering amounts of money earned by some people on OnlyFans attracted people who had never previously done anything like this to the platform.
[00:09:48] This previously unknown British website became part of mainstream culture, referenced even in a song by Beyoncé.
[00:09:57] Now, for the record, I should add that OnlyFans isn’t only sexually explicit content of naked women. There is also sexually explicit content provided by men, although men only make up 30% of the “content creators”, but, as you might imagine, 70% of the people paying for content.
[00:10:18] There is also content that isn’t exactly sexually explicit, but is still content of a sexual nature.
[00:10:26] For example, there was a story back in 2021 of a Canadian plumber who packed it all in, he quit his day job, to go on OnlyFans, where he has made over a million dollars primarily selling pictures of his feet.
[00:10:42] There is even content that isn’t sexually explicit at all. There are food influencers, travel reviewers, all sorts of people who use OnlyFans as a way to connect directly with their fans, and be rewarded for the content they create, but they tend to be much less popular and much worse paid than the people who are prepared to bare all.
[00:11:07] After all, sex sells.
[00:11:10] But in August of 2021, OnlyFans shocked its users by announcing that it was going to ban all sexual content.
[00:11:19] There was a huge uproar from its community, and after much toing and froing, the decision was reversed a mere six days later.
[00:11:28] In fact, there is an interesting backstory as to why this happened, it’s too long to go into here, but if you are interested in it you can listen to episode number 376, where we talk about the relationship between the world of finance and the world of porn.
[00:11:44] Now, back to our story. It would be remiss of me perhaps to not make any kind of link between OnlyFans and the membership we have for this podcast, and for Leonardo English.
[00:11:56] In case you hadn’t realised, we have a membership that allows people to subscribe for a mixture of bonus content and learning materials, like interactive transcripts and advanced vocabulary, as well as support the work that my small team and I do, exactly like an OnlyFans.
[00:12:14] Of course, there are no nudes or suggestive pictures involved, and it is my understanding that people become members for slightly different reasons to the reason someone might subscribe to an OnlyFans account, but there are some parallels between what I am doing and what is done by the good ladies of OnlyFans.
[00:12:34] And although some critics might say, “well, the “content creators” of OnlyFans are just taking off their clothes off, it’s hardly work”, in the interviews I went through when researching this episode, for the most successful people on the platform, it does seem like a demanding and most certainly full-time job.
[00:12:54] There is the preparing for the photoshoots, choosing the pictures, messaging fans, creating images and videos. Many are putting in 12 hour days, and then waking up to dozens of messages from fans, requests for new videos, and so on.
[00:13:10] Like many things, perhaps it sounds glamorous and wonderful to be sought after by so many strangers all over the world, but the reality is that it can be hard and serious work.
[00:13:23] Or perhaps it doesn’t sound glamorous at all.
[00:13:26] For most of the creators on OnlyFans, despite the fact that they are called “creators” or “entrepreneurs”, it is, at the end of the day, sex work, and comes with many of the same difficulties as “traditional” sex work.
[00:13:41] According to one recent survey, 50% of adult content creators on OnlyFans admitted that it has negatively impacted their personal life, ruining relationships and meaning that they have trouble finding a partner.
[00:13:55] Now, perhaps you are hearing this and thinking, “well, obviously, I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was selling naked pictures of themself to strangers on the internet”.
[00:14:06] Or perhaps you’re listening and thinking, “people are so closed minded, OnlyFans is a powerful way for women who might otherwise be exploited to be their own boss”.
[00:14:17] Whatever side you fall down on, clearly having an OnlyFans is becoming a more and more acceptable thing for a person to do, and a more acceptable thing for people to subscribe to.
[00:14:29] To be precise, according to the OnlyFans financial accounts from 2022, the platform now has over 3 million “creators” and going on 250 million “fans”.
[00:14:42] And it makes bucketloads of money. $5.5 billion was spent on the site in 2022, meaning the 20% cut the company takes was worth $1.1 billion.
[00:14:57] It is a huge business, and it’s one that is changing society.
[00:15:02] These are 3 million people selling predominantly explicit content on the internet, many of whom would never have done it before, but have been lured in by the promise of making tens of thousands of dollars a month.
[00:15:16] Yes, an OnlyFans account, and its associated content can be deleted at any time, but there are ways that people can take screenshots and make copies of the content, which will exist…well, forever.
[00:15:32] According to some of the greatest critics of the platform, millions of people, predominantly young people and predominantly young women, are simply unaware or in denial about what damage they may be doing to their future prospects in exchange for a quick buck today.
[00:15:50] And for most, they really aren’t making that much money at all.
[00:15:55] For all of the stories of people making millions of dollars a year by sharing some intimate pictures and engaging with fans, according to one report there are only 300 creators who earn more than a million dollars a year.
[00:16:10] The average creator on OnlyFans, according to the same report, only has 21 paying subscribers and earns $180 a month.
[00:16:21] Of course, $180 is still $180, and especially in countries with weaker currencies that can go a long way.
[00:16:30] But in places like the United States or the United Kingdom, where $180 a month really isn’t all that much, it begs the question of whether it really is worth it.
[00:16:41] Is it worth a future boss, colleague, partner or family member finding out about your OnlyFans account and seeing your intimate photos only to make enough money to cover your electricity bill?
[00:16:55] Maybe it is, and for some creators it is about more than just making money; it’s about what the money brings.
[00:17:03] For the most successful creators on OnlyFans, it has changed their lives, allowing them to become spectacularly wealthy and more importantly, in control of their own destiny.
[00:17:14] You could say that they get trapped on a hamster wheel of content creation, constantly having to share new pictures and videos in order to retain their fans and reel in new ones, but they are free to quit at any time.
[00:17:29] For the women who switched from traditional sex work to OnlyFans, women who were strippers or porn stars, it has allowed them to take what they were doing anyway and monetise it in a much more effective and safer way, without manipulative male bosses or producers getting between them and the people who want to consume their content, and without being harassed by seedy men in nightclubs or hotel rooms.
[00:17:55] But for everyone else, the impact is less clear.
[00:18:00] And we’ve been talking primarily about the content creator side of things so far, the principally female content creators sharing their explicit content with their fans.
[00:18:11] We haven’t really talked about the people paying for it, the predominantly male audience that spent over $5 billion paying for nude content in 2022.
[00:18:23] Of course, men being able to pay to access some sort of sexual content is nothing new, whether we’re talking about prostitution in Pompeii or someone in the 1960s reading Playboy magazine.
[00:18:36] But the scale and the ease with which someone can access personalised sexual content on OnlyFans is something new and unparalleled. You can sign up in minutes, subscribe to unlock explicit content of a stranger on the internet, send them messages, and video requests. And all for just a few dollars.
[00:18:57] So, how does this affect the men who use it?
[00:19:02] Well, there are fears about how this might damage a man’s ability to be intimate with someone in real life, and how it will alter expectations about how a partner should behave.
[00:19:13] If a young man grows up being able to request personalised sexual content at the tap of a button, having his choice of 3 million different people of all shapes, sizes, and personalities, and being able to chat with any of them anonymously, for a fee of course, how will this affect his ability to exist in the real world, how will it affect his ability to have a relationship with a real woman, or with a real man for that matter?
[00:19:42] It is a big unknown, and to its biggest critics OnlyFans is doing huge damage to society, it’s just happening slowly, so like a frog in boiling water, we won’t realise until it’s too late.
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for today's episode on OnlyFans.
[00:20:03] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:07] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:10] Do you think OnlyFans is a harmless platform enabling people to earn a decent living, or is it much more dangerous than people realise?
[00:20:18] Do you know anyone who has joined OnlyFans, and how has it impacted them?
[00:20:23] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:27] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
