All links in this article may lead to NSFW content.
Alexis James first learned about OnlyFans in 2020, while watching an episode of 90 Day Fiancé in which a cast member mentioned she'd started an account. A long-time porn fan, James had daydreamed for years about making adult content, but ultimately pursued a career in finance. Thanks to the pandemic, though, she had some time on her hands, and OnlyFans sounded pretty accessible. So she signed up, too.
"I was like, 'This is going to be an easy side hustle,'" James recalls. She'd film when she could, post on a schedule, and "get super rich off of it."
That's how OnlyFans seems to work, if you're going off of blaring tabloid headlines about people like rapper Lil Tay, who reportedly joined OnlyFans days after turning 18 and made about a million bucks in three hours.
But after weeks of low engagement and virtually no income from her account, James realized her approach to the platform just wasn't working. She pulled out some finance-world tricks and tools, running analyses on profitable pages and reading up on best practices in an attempt to suss out the secrets to OnlyFans success. And she soon realized that, as she puts it, "the amount of work that goes into content creation is way beyond anything I could have imagined."
While the content on OnlyFans and similar platforms may look super casual, a ton of invisible setup and editing goes into each photo or clip. Successful creators do loads of market research as well, to build a unique personal brand, market themselves to potential fans via social media, and figure out what content their fans want. Because the internet's lousy with free porn, these fans ultimately pay less for that content and more for access to creators. So, performers have to engage constantly in a way that feels individualized and authentic, or face backlash from sometimes parasocial and pushy folks.
The average creator only makes about $1,300 a year. Those who want to make a living have to treat OnlyFans like a serious, full-time job. "You have no fucking idea," says Andie Anderson, who's been on OnlyFans since 2020. "I use my business degree every day… more than I did while working for [mainstream] corporations."
And those who want to make it really big — to be a top-earning success story — basically have to start and manage a small business. "I work over 90 hours a week and have a 15-person team," says Bryce Adams, one of OnlyFans' top earners. "My yearly payroll is over $1 million."
Creators are increasingly open about the work that goes into OnlyFans success. And many of their fans "recognize and respect the amount of labor it takes to consistently produce high-quality content," says Emily van der Nagel, an academic who's studied the OnlyFans ecosystem.
But the notion James had in her head in 2020 — that OnlyFans must be easy money — remains widespread, says Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith, a researcher who studies gig-economy sex work. "Everyone thinks you just take off your clothes and money appears out of thin air," adds Adams.
Where does that wildly inaccurate idea come from? And why does it persist, despite an ever-growing body of conflicting evidence? Mashable reached out to a half dozen academics who've studied OnlyFans and similar platforms, and a dozen prominent content creators, to try to get to the bottom of this mystery.
The roots of the belief are complex but worth untangling, because the idea that OnlyFans prints low-effort cash is not only demeaning to talented and hard-working creators. It's also potentially dangerous.
Why people think sex work is "easy money"
"The idea that sex work is easy money is an old trope," explains Heather Berg, a feminist scholar of sex and labor who's studied the experiences of sex workers.
Stormi Maya, who worked as a dom, a stripper, and a sugar baby before breaking into OnlyFans, says some of that's down to the fact that you don't need any experience or training in order to earn some decent cash. "People are like, 'Well, anyone can enter the field, therefore it's easy.'"
But folks are quicker to dismiss sex workers than other supposedly low-skill fields, like manual labor, because most cultures view it as dirty and thus worthless. Outsiders see tons of money flowing into the adult industry, says Cherie DeVille, a longtime porn star who's cultivated a strong OnlyFans following, and assume they could get a fat slice of that pie — if they weren't "a well-raised person, a good person, an ethical person."
Everyone thinks you just take off your clothes and money appears out of thin air.
As Easterbrook-Smith puts it, "The unspoken second half of the sentiment 'OnlyFans is easy money' is, 'and they don't deserve it.'"
"Most people featured in OnlyFans content, and porn more broadly, are women," adds van der Nagel. "And women's work is denigrated and dismissed across industries."
"If women can succeed at it, the logic goes, it must be easy."
Maya believes that particular view is growing stronger and more visible thanks to the growing popularity of explicitly misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate.
Sites like OnlyFans turbocharge these ideas because, as digital porn platform researcher Maggie MacDonald explains, they're designed to seem easy. Modern porn platforms thrive on network effects — i.e., on shepherding as many creators and users into their ecosystem as possible. Not only do they make it simple to sign up, putting an emphasis on security, privacy, and self-determination, but they also subtly mainstream and normalize sex work, blurring the lines between adult creators and other influencers and keeping their platforms in the zeitgeist.
"You see OnlyFans in pop culture, hear it in songs," says DeVille. It makes opening an OnlyFans account feel more acceptable, more doable, to most people than, say, opening a porn clip store.
Lifestyle publications and tabloids also run a steady stream of success stories: of women who went from living on benefits to making "£10k a month with sexy pics" overnight, or bankers who quit their corporate jobs to earn "$400k a year" doing fulfilling OnlyFans work on their time. (James is pretty sure these sorts of stories led to her own skewed view of OnlyFans work.) These pieces may mention the work that goes into running a page, but they focus on low-stress wealth and empowerment.
"There are a few anomalies where, yeah, maybe that happened for one lucky person," says Anderson. "But all of these girls are like, 'I'm making a million dollars a month, blah, blah, blah."
"Bullshit."
Susanna Paasonen, a longtime digital porn researcher, believes this genre took off in the press at the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when people were flocking to OnlyFans for extra cash and human connection. At their best, they were feel-good stories for a dark period. But they persist, suggests OnlyFans creator Bea York, because "our culture loves a get-rich-quick story."
MelRose Michaels, the founder of Sex Work CEO, an adult creator education and resource hub, believes that creators themselves play a major role in perpetuating this rosy coverage.
Most creators sell the idea, as MacDonald puts it, "that you're getting a little glimpse into my extremely sexy life." That means making it seem like they're incredibly successful and happy, explains Easterbrook-Smith, while obscuring the work that goes into creating that "authentic" image. Most consumers want that easy-breezy fantasy of joyful, prosperous exhibitionism and open intimacy rather than a complex human story. Typically, the more successful a creator is, the more effortless they make success seem.
"Cherie DeVille doesn't exist," DeVille explains. She's a character, bound by rules of engagement and presentation like any other brand presence on social media. "There's never going to be a day where I go on OnlyFans with my woes. That doesn't make money."
Even people who flame out on OnlyFans rarely talk about their struggles, adds creator Penny Barber, if only because "it's pretty embarrassing to fail as a sex worker. To see that there's a dollar value affixed to your attractiveness — and it's low."
"Many veterans only share the good parts because we are also trying to fight the stigma that comes with being a sex worker," argues York. "We can't talk about the tough stuff or the labor that goes into our success, because anti-sex work folks will just weaponize that against us." That imperative is especially strong now, as a fervent anti-porn movement picks up strength, especially in the United States.
Anderson acknowledges that there's logic to all of this, but "it sets expectations that aren't real."
How predatory agencies exploit the "easy money" myth
As OnlyFans grew increasingly saturated at the turn of the 2020s, a parallel industry emerged — management agencies — to help creators manage the backend work of branding, marketing and even engaging with fans, in exchange for a cut of their profits. (Beyond the cut OnlyFans itself takes.) The field is inherently controversial; fans have tried to sue agencies, creators, and even OnlyFans itself for fraud upon realizing they were chatting with a proxy rather than a creator. But many large and established agencies seem to operate with transparency and good faith.
Mashable reached out to several prominent agencies for this story. Only two replied, indicating that they would, or would consider, getting back to us. Neither ultimately did.
A slew of small and shady agencies, however, make their money by actively perpetuating the "easy money" myth — sometimes targeting young women on other social media sites, promising to make them a steady stream of cash. All these newbies have to do, they say, is start an account, take some explicit photos and videos, then turn over their credentials and contents to the agencies.
That may sound like an obvious scam, but far too many people buy into this promise for the same reasons we buy into the wider "easy money" narrative: "A lot of people have jobs they don't like, and a fantasy that doing some other job would be better, easier, more fun," says DeVille.
"The idea of doing OnlyFans is nice," adds creator Chloe Amour, "because you can work from home and choose your own schedule."
People (typically non-sex workers) want to believe in the dream of OnlyFans so badly that some even hold onto the "easy money" notion despite personally knowing creators. James, who decided to get serious about OnlyFans in 2022, broke into traditional porn in 2023, and now has a thriving, full-time adult industry career, says most of her friends still maintain that view, "and it won't change, because they've never lived it." But the few who've "helped me actually film and edit some content, they have definitely altered their perspective. They're shocked by how much work it takes."
This is not a harmless belief.
The real financial hardship sex workers face
No matter the source or intent, the belief that OnlyFans is easy demeans and belittles creators who put a great deal of time, skill, and effort into crafting an image of effortless sexuality.
This view is also, argues creator Jessica Ryan, "really dangerous" for newcomers.
The mainstreaming of OnlyFans has softened some of the stigmas around at least some forms of sex work, DeVille acknowledges, but the social consequences of entering the industry are "still real enough." Adult creators face risks of financial discrimination and legal scrutiny, family strife and social rejection, and especially doxxing and stalking. "99.9 percent of my fans are awesome, normal people who would probably take a bullet for me," says Adams. "But that risk still exists."
In Maya's experience, creating content for OnlyFans is definitely safer than working at a strip club, where people felt entitled to grab at her, make advances on her, and follow her around. However, she says, "You'd be surprised how many men will pay just to harass you."
"The internet is forever," adds Anderson. If you put up even one video, it may float around indefinitely. You have to operate on the assumption that everyone you know will see it someday. "So you really have to make it count," rather than diving in because it seems easy.
The worst small, off-grid agencies — the downright predatory ones — also lure in happy-go-lucky young folks with the promise of easy money, only to steal profits from them, hold their content over their heads as blackmail, or even in a few rare but horrific cases traffic and abuse them.
"If somebody pulls you into this world without giving you a breakdown of the issues with it, they're likely not good people," cautions Maya, who knows creators who've been exploited.
"This doesn't mean you shouldn't go for it," if you're interested in OnlyFans, DeVille notes. "Just go in with your eyes open."
Confront the risks. Decide how to mitigate them and if you can live with them. Only commit if the benefits for you outweigh the risks. And if you're ready to put in some real, hard work.
"But if you want an easy life," DeVille says, "keep your nine to five."
Creators Cubbi Thompson and Rachel Steele also provided insights that informed this article.
