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The Economics of OnlyFans: Most accounts make less than $145/mo

159 points by amin 5y ago

Quequau 5y ago
I'm a mod on Reddit and in a few of the subreddits I moderate I see a steady stream of accounts promoting online sex work, like onlyfans. None of these subreddits welcome promotion or advertising... or for that matter NSFW content. However, so many of these accounts advertise their sex work by posting content that ostensibly complies with the community rules but which somehow encourages other users to look at their user profile to find the NSFW content and then become shockingly objectionable when their content is removed, that we've been obliged to implement a blanket ban on all of that sort of account and now use a bot to find it. I can't believe I've been subjected to the level of abuse I'm getting from people who are on average making less than $145 a month.
- benrbray 5y ago
  That's two or three weeks of groceries if you're on a budget. It can make a huge difference for some people -- especially the type of people who don't feel like they have any options but sex work. It's hard to blame them since OF is a relatively safe way to do it, too.
  - warent 5y ago
    exactly. For people in HN who probably make at least 6 figures on average, it's easy to forget that for many people, an extra $1.5k a year reflects a significant pay percent increase, like 5% raise.
    - lostinquebec 5y ago
      And the most humanising 5%, the 5% that you use to either keep your head above water, or buy a tiny luxury you never do, like a meal out or even a steak to cook at home. I lived by myself on welfare in the last 12 months of university, and my rent was $175 per week, welfare was $175 per week, and I had $3,000 saved to last the year. So I lived on effectively $100 a week after rent and electricity.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rubyn00bie 5y ago
      +11 There was a period of time my rent was more than my wage $725/month vs $700. I was subsisting off of unlocking phones for people (who those mostly didn't want to do it themselves or didn't trust themselves), dumpster[1] pizza, and the ~$200 a month extra I was able to make ($20 an unlock) was my utilities and non-dumpster-pizza food money. [1] Literally, from a dumpster. Most local pizza places aren't run by douchebags and tend to put the leftovers in their own bag/box for the poor to consume. I truly appreciated it (much love to Hot Lips in particular), as Pizza was a luxury way beyond anything I could afford at the time.
    - Aerroon 5y ago
      And if you consider other countries that could be far more than 5%.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    No options? They could deliver food for DoorDash.
    - ViViDboarder 5y ago
      If you have a car.
      - CheezeIt 5y ago
        I’m eating at a Panda Express right now. They have a big sign up offering $15.6/hr for their lowest level hire, with other positions open, too.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  That's because they push spam to try to make the rumored 1000s a month.
- stbtrax 5y ago
  which somehow encourages other users to look at their user profile So, hinting that they're a woman on reddit?
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Are we not past that?
- meowface 5y ago
  Note that although OF claims to do (or may even actually do) identity verification, some of these may be bots using other people's photos and may be components of larger automated spam campaigns/platforms. $100/month multiplied by a large N can be good money. And a small percentage of the bot accounts might make a lot more.
- saurik 5y ago
  > I can't believe I've been subjected to the level of abuse I'm getting from people who are on average making less than $145 a month. Can you unpack this sentence and explain what it is about "people who are on average making less than $145 a month" that makes the abuse you are getting from them specifically unbelievable? (edit: Wow, -3 after only 20 minutes?... I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect. I think that's the fastest downvoting I have gotten, even contrasted with when I say negative things about Apple, Signal, or Rust. I highly recommend thinking hard about what it means to believe that it is ever appropriate to speak with as much disdain about people who are struggling as Quequao just did... it was frankly downright shameful.)
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    Such people would not bother to put so much effort in spam and abuse for a reward of $136.
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    You're getting downvoted because you made a bad faith assumption in a way that comes off as hostile. > I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect. They don't, they hate people who make that assumption.
    - rualca 5y ago
      > You're getting downvoted because you made a bad faith assumption in a way that comes off as hostile. I confirm that was precisely the reason why I downvoted that post. Not only does that post indicate the poster failed to read and understand OP's post but the poster's comment suggests the misunderstanding was disingenuous and intended to put up a strawman designed to gratuitously attack OP with pseudo-moralist arguments.
  - jcims 5y ago
    The point isn’t that they are ‘only’ making $145 a month. It’s that people are willing to be abusive to other humans over it. It’s like those annoying relatives that are willing to throw away any authenticity in their relationship with you in order to hustle their shitty MLM product that is making them next to nothing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pseudo0 5y ago
  Maybe they're thinking about the thousands of dollars they aren't (but could be) making rather than the $145 they are? From that delusional perspective, you're costing them untold potential income.
  - ptr2voidStar 5y ago
    The human mind is indeed fascinating
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Due to stigmatization policies they can't use the normal ad channels to advertise their patreon, so it only makes sense to go the "organic content" route. And from their PoV they are sticking to the rules of the relevant subreddits, yet still get their content deleted or banned. I don't find it surprising people get upset when viewing the situation from their side.
  - graeme 5y ago
    I’m a moderator. Very likely you’re wrong. Anything systematic like that is probably generated by a system where someone wrote a script of common phrases and handed it off to low wage labour to write. Highly doubt any actual creator is doing that. The payoff of untargeted spam is so low! Only makes sense if it’s outsourced at scale like any garden variety spam ring. The usual and profitable way people promote their onlyfans on reddit is by posting pictures and videos.
    - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
      I think OP was referring to cases like OF creators posting to places like r/roastme where thirsty redditors can see that they're hot, check out their profile, and see the pinned link to their OFs. That kind of thing is not likely to be automated.
    - OnlyFriendsThwy 5y ago
      How systematic are you talking? I happen to know an OF creator who promotes herself that way and she doesn't do anything in an automatic fashion, just creates her own submissions to subreddits and gets burned by such moderators. I happen to agree with formerly_proven . When my OF friend described how she submitted topical stuff to subreddits in the hopes that others would follow up on her profile, I was like, "what's wrong with that? Isn't that how people are supposed to promote themselves? Giving out free, relevant stuff in the hopes you'll want to know more about them?" I mean, isn't that how ethical self-promotion is supposed to work? Join a community, obey their norms, contribute, and if they like you, they'll follow up? How do you expect it to work? <insert caveat about how you have no reason to believe this experience, since the sensitivity of the issue requires me to use a throwaway and hide her identity as well>
- 55555 5y ago
  They often have pimps who run the social media marketing.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  I was concluding the opposite: all that abuse is probably because it's only a few bucks a day with advertising. Without the abuse they'd probably rarely get anything.
- tsss 5y ago
  $145 a month just for being born a woman and taking a few pictures. Basically free money. Who wouldn't do it?
- zibzab 5y ago
  Some subs now ban posters that are on OF regardless of the post content.
Dylan16807 5y ago
> The median take-home revenue is $136 per month. If you value a creator’s time at a $15 minimum wage, the median creator needs to be spending less than 9 hours per month on her OnlyFans to break even. > Relative to effort, it looks like most accounts lose money. I guess you could assume that. But I'm not convinced without data. If you asked me whether I expect the median OnlyFans creator to spend more or less than 10 hours a month, I'd definitely guess less. I'd expect there to be a lot of inactive or barely active accounts.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Furthermore, the author is assuming the creator is in the US, which isn't a given. There are countries where $136/month is a fairly decent living.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - csomar 5y ago
    With the current food prices, there are no countries where $136/month is a fairly decent living. Countries where $150/month is the average salary are a hellish place to live in.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Current food prices where?
      - csomar 5y ago
        The food prices in most countries follow the international prices of several commodities. If cars, and gas are more expensive, then food becomes more expensive in most parts of the world.
        watwut 5y ago
        There are serious differences between food prices around the world. They may change with gas prices, but that does not make them the same.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Why those people are not treated as employees and paid at least a minimum wage?
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  How would that even work? Only Fans has no idea how much time these people are spending doing 'marketing' (spamming reddit)
  - intricatedetail 5y ago
    Like any other employment. Can you be more precise?
    - gambiting 5y ago
      No, can you be more precise? Do you know how OnlyFans works? It’s like reading that majority of seller accounts on eBay make less than $145 a month and then replying that they should be treated like employees - employees of who? eBay? OnlyFans lets you sell your content online, just like you would on eBay or Etsy - if you want to make more money then…make more content? Or make content that people want to buy? I don’t even understand whose employees you think they should be in this scenario.
      - intricatedetail 5y ago
        Isn't that the same as taking overtime as an employee? They are working for the benefit of OF. It's like saying a factory let's you assemble phones and if you want to make more money assemble more.
        morelikeborelax 5y ago
        Onlyfans is a service not a content provider or media company. What you are suggesting is akin to Shopify, Etsy or eBay paying a minimum wage to sellers.
        5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
that's ... a lot? compared to $0 most posted videos make, especially porn videos. Onlyfans should expand to non-nsfw content and bring people over from youtube. It's a different monetization model when the ad revenue option is not available.
- dijit 5y ago
  I have genuinely looked at OnlyFans for content which is not sex related, since it's a large name and I'm becoming increasingly disenfranchised with youtube. One issue though is that discoverability is very poor on OnlyFans. I suspect this is what causes "OnlyFans Spam" on places like reddit. OnlyFans has little incentive to fix that though, as everyone spamming is basically advertising their platform externally. So, lose/lose?
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Other paid-content platforms - like Patreon and Substack - also seem pretty light on discoverability. I'm not sure why that is.
    - hexa22 5y ago
      You don’t find people on patreon, you find them on other platforms and then pay money typically for some way to interact with big personalities. I doubt there is much demand for scrolling through an index page of strangers to pay them money.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      maybe because most overly puplic communities turn into cesspits?
    - dvh 5y ago
      I know why, look at the front page of bitschute (or however it is spelled). It's full of conspiracy and extremists videos, if only fan showed popular stuff it would be 100% porn.
    - deleted 5y ago
orthoxerox 5y ago
I'm sure similar income distribution applies to all user-generated digital content platforms like YT, Patreon, Twitch, etc. A few superstars that make crazy money, some professionals who use the platform as their main source of income and a long thin tail of amateurs. The market is supersaturated now, even with the obesity epidemic there are so many college girls with perfect figures willing to bare everything for $10 a month that choosing among them is a challenge.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  The market seems past supersaturated, theres more college girls with perfect bodies willing to bare everything for free than youll be able to watch in your lifetime
- GrumpyNl 5y ago
  Its all about the whales. On dating chats we had some whales who would spend around 7-10k a month.
  - kfprt 5y ago
    This doc from the NYT mentions the whales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Can confirm. I make my living on Patreon, but I am in the top 100 worldwide in the 'music' category (I write open source DSP plugins) and I make a bit over $2000 a month. It falls away very very rapidly: top ten worldwide is what people envision for 'making good money' and is competitive with say a career software developer in the 90s or 00s. Top hundred worldwide is 'getting by pretty comfortably if you don't live anywhere significant, especially if you still qualify for food stamps or what have you', and it's competitive with what a career software developer will be making by 2030 or 2040 at the most. Top thousand worldwide is already down to your $200 a month or so, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on these platforms. This is the nature of markets in an attention economy that scales worldwide: you're getting squeezed out by anybody anywhere, and if you're a niche (I'm a niche, but not alone in it: by now, there's another plugin dev who is pushing harder for money and making more than me, who is also Patreon-exclusive) then that limits the maximum size you can scale. It's absolutely going to be the same on OnlyFans, Twitch, etc. As a job mostly this sort of thing is 'spend a bunch of money to operate at a competitive level, and then you don't earn anything to speak of'. This IS free market dynamics in a state of maximum globalized low friction. Silicon Valley has spent a lot of time selling people on low friction interaction and discoverability. Tearing down the walls means you're competing with the girl with a perfect figure who's in New Delhi and has family money backing her (for whatever reason), and her competing with you means you work less. When this seriously kicks in for the very software devs who've created this situation (and it may have been inevitable, let's not directly blame) and AI begins to compete with human workers at content creation and software development, the OnlyFans/Patreon/Twitch picture becomes the world, and at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability. A lot of these platforms are sustained by whales. I'd do substantially better (but would ruin my positioning) if I targeted whales.
lazyjones 5y ago
> One important thing this analysis of public data misses is tipping. A substantial proportion of the top accounts’ revenue comes from tips I suppose this makes the whole headline somewhat dubious.
alkonaut 5y ago
Should this be compared to a “job” or to YouTube or Podcasts? I’d expect there to be a tiny majority making a living, then another tiny majority making anything more than peanuts, and finally a massive tail of accounts that are inactive, only posts sporadically and so on. It would be interesting to see the stats for users that actually try to live off it, such as a set of accounts publishing at least X hours of material per week for the last 100 weeks.
Lazare 5y ago
So... the punchline here seems to be the median revenue per content creator. Except: 1) The denominator is skewed by a large number of people who signed up but aren't seriously pursuing it, and may not even be active. 2) The numerator is skewed by the fact that this omits tips entirely, and much of the sample is missing the subscription price or the number of subscribers, so numbers had to be guessed. So in other words, the $145/mo was calculated by taking one number we know is wrong, and dividing by another number we know is wrong. ...offhand, I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. I have to give props to the author; they're quite clear in the analysis section that they're missing all the data they need ("...many accounts don't have their number of fans available", "[using likes] as a proxy for number of fans [...] is likely an underestimate", many accounts had several subscription tiers). But given all the caveats, I don't think there's anything left to conclude.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  It seems more like a Fermi estimate.
  - hansvm 5y ago
    > I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. > Fermi estimate It's more like a Fermi estimate, but the inputs still probably aren't good enough to be meaningful. E.g., on other set-your-own-hours platforms like doordash, MLM pyramid schemes, and uber it's expected that 99% of the workers won't work more than a few hours per month (this is also a bad Fermi estimate -- could be off by 10x either direction). As a corollary, just taking the $145 and multiplying by 100ish (based also on your definition of full-time) could be a much better estimate for the earnings potential for somebody looking to seriously pursue OnlyFans. Pendantic note: the point here isn't that $14,500 is a better estimate; it's that the magnitude of all the unknowns in trying to compute such a thing is so great that we can't even reach the level of certainty a Fermi approximation provides without more data.
- vbtemp 5y ago
  Yeah, I read that over too - crap data in, crap analysis, and crap results out. There's a lot that's wrong with the article: - Someone else in this thread correctly highlighted that on stackoverflow, for example, simply having one answer to a question puts you in the top 25th percentile. Most accounts are probably idle or passive or abandoned, so using those to get the result is obviously wrong. Maybe, what are the expected earnings for users investing more than 8 hours/week (purchasing equipment, producing content, editing, publishing, marketing)? - People on this thread need to stop looking at the $145/month figure from the title. It doesn't come from anything. A lot of people are kind of stuck on that. By no means what so ever should it be interpreted as "girls who have only fans make $145/month", which people seem to be doing. Based on the income distribution, virtually no one makes approximately $145/month. It's just an artifact being the quotient of two numbers the author chose. A small-ish proportion of total users make _way more than $145/month_, and a large proportion of the user base (including idle and abandoned accounts) makes pretty much zero. Maybe I'm just broadcasting my lack of statistical knowledge, but I'm struggling to understand what does an average or median even signify for extremely long-tailed, skewed distributions? - And finally, if one is making a serious analysis - lots of jokes and euphemisms about masturbation and theatrical contempt for the consumers - seem to suggest either discomfort on the part of the author or some kind of motivated reasoning to arrive at their results.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
user5994461 5y ago
Average and median have little meaning when most accounts never make any content. We can compare to stackoverflow that probably has similar economics. - There are 15.236M accounts on stack overflow. - Only 4.046M accounts have more than one reputation, that's equivalent to one answer or two. - 1.095M accounts have more than 1000 reputation. That was very easy if you started in the first few years of stack overflow, or is quite a bit of participation nowadays. - 0.232M accounts have more than 2000 reputation. Main take away, you can be top 26% percentile for posting a single answer or question.
- ianai 5y ago
  Sheesh that abuse of powers of ten notation. Is this common?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    I don't see any powers of ten notation? And using the same unit for all the account numbers is a very good thing.
    - user5994461 5y ago
      I edited
bhalina 5y ago
Seems like Medium. Isn't all of the internet like this? Accounts at the top make exponentially more?
anovikov 5y ago
I did similar analysis for Upwork and results were much much more drastic. Like, vast majority of accounts never earning anything, and a bunch of multimillion dollar accounts (most of them probably suggesting scams or money laundering - that was before i became a $2M account myself lol), and majority of money made by people who make very little, <$1000 per month, but stubbornly trying for years and years, probably having no other way out. Grim picture.
- ivrrimum 5y ago
  Have been doing full time freelancing for past 4 years on Upwork. I make good money and definitely not $1k a month, there are a lot of bot accounts on Upwork, which i think pollutes the data set.
- dvh 5y ago
  Why grim? I work 1h a day and earn just enough to get by. Before I worked in a normal job 8h a day plus 2h commute, that was grim.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    You would be one of the whales. Also, depending on what you do for that hour, as an entrepreneur you might be drastically underestimating the time and attention commitment you make.
- datenhorst 5y ago
  What's the story of you becoming a $2M account yourself?
  - anovikov 5y ago
    No story really. Just a lot of grind, developing a niche, finding my perfect model of clients, building a site, a boxed product to sell, and a large library of copy-paste code, working fixed price, working with good recruiters to get good cheap coders. Gradual progress. Took 10 years to get from 50K to 500K per year.
dyeje 5y ago
I imagine it follows a similar distribution as something like Substack.
lavajava 5y ago
It's wise to already be in the shovel business during a gold rush. It's harder to figure out what the next big thing will be.
rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
Article was posted April 2020. The numbers today are probably much higher with little change in overall proportions.
gccs 5y ago
This is the same for all parts of the economy and human condition. A small percentage of people produce nearly everything of value.
antirez 5y ago
145/mo for most accounts is incredibly high. Take, for instance, what happens with Youtube: most people there do 5$/mo.
xyzzy21 5y ago
A lot like how Uber and Lyft do more to oppress and impoverish than raise wealth for client laborers.
thow16161 5y ago
The lack of transparency and discoverability on OF is a pain for both subscribers and creators. And the creators do work really hard. My ex-sugar gf is an OF creator. I was with her when she started (transitioned from MyFreeCams where I met her, and brought some of her members with her). She worked her ass off to claw her way to the top 3% which is where she was when I broke things off with her. She spent way, way more time on social media, promoting herself and her brand, than she did actually making content. There are groups of creators that promote each other's social media & content on twitter and ig, and its critical to get hooked into one of those groups to succeed if you're not already a major IG or Twitter star with millions of followers. Even at 3%, she was not making a huge amount of $$. I wish OF had more transparency around how the percentages relate to actual income..
failwhaleshark 5y ago
I had two, now one because they moved in with their fiancee, neighbors who made more than rent ($1500/month) on OF. The now one isn't very good looking, spent $15k on plastic surgery, and they still look very lumpy/dumpy. (K of FMK.) I think what this small sample-size shows is it's all about marketing / influencing creating audience-driven-content if they are determined and consistent, even if the talent isn't all that. There are apparently enough lonely/horny men to fund this sort of business model when the talent is savvy enough to monetize. I'm sure the vast majority of accounts are under-monetized talent, inconsistent, hobbyists, or they gave-up and did something else for income.
walrus01 5y ago
The author of this piece seems to take an overly moralistic and salacious approach to how they present the subject matter.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Democrats want a 99% cut of OnlyFans.

159 points by amin 5y ago

I'm a mod on Reddit and in a few of the subreddits I moderate I see a steady stream of accounts promoting online sex work, like onlyfans. None of these subreddits welcome promotion or advertising... or for that matter NSFW content. However, so many of these accounts advertise their sex work by posting content that ostensibly complies with the community rules but which somehow encourages other users to look at their user profile to find the NSFW content and then become shockingly objectionable when their content is removed, that we've been obliged to implement a blanket ban on all of that sort of account and now use a bot to find it. I can't believe I've been subjected to the level of abuse I'm getting from people who are on average making less than $145 a month.

benrbray 5y ago
That's two or three weeks of groceries if you're on a budget. It can make a huge difference for some people -- especially the type of people who don't feel like they have any options but sex work. It's hard to blame them since OF is a relatively safe way to do it, too.
- warent 5y ago
  exactly. For people in HN who probably make at least 6 figures on average, it's easy to forget that for many people, an extra $1.5k a year reflects a significant pay percent increase, like 5% raise.
  - lostinquebec 5y ago
    And the most humanising 5%, the 5% that you use to either keep your head above water, or buy a tiny luxury you never do, like a meal out or even a steak to cook at home. I lived by myself on welfare in the last 12 months of university, and my rent was $175 per week, welfare was $175 per week, and I had $3,000 saved to last the year. So I lived on effectively $100 a week after rent and electricity.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rubyn00bie 5y ago
    +11 There was a period of time my rent was more than my wage $725/month vs $700. I was subsisting off of unlocking phones for people (who those mostly didn't want to do it themselves or didn't trust themselves), dumpster[1] pizza, and the ~$200 a month extra I was able to make ($20 an unlock) was my utilities and non-dumpster-pizza food money. [1] Literally, from a dumpster. Most local pizza places aren't run by douchebags and tend to put the leftovers in their own bag/box for the poor to consume. I truly appreciated it (much love to Hot Lips in particular), as Pizza was a luxury way beyond anything I could afford at the time.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    And if you consider other countries that could be far more than 5%.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  No options? They could deliver food for DoorDash.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    If you have a car.
    - CheezeIt 5y ago
      I’m eating at a Panda Express right now. They have a big sign up offering $15.6/hr for their lowest level hire, with other positions open, too.
agumonkey 5y ago
That's because they push spam to try to make the rumored 1000s a month.
stbtrax 5y ago
which somehow encourages other users to look at their user profile So, hinting that they're a woman on reddit?
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Are we not past that?
meowface 5y ago
Note that although OF claims to do (or may even actually do) identity verification, some of these may be bots using other people's photos and may be components of larger automated spam campaigns/platforms. $100/month multiplied by a large N can be good money. And a small percentage of the bot accounts might make a lot more.
saurik 5y ago
> I can't believe I've been subjected to the level of abuse I'm getting from people who are on average making less than $145 a month. Can you unpack this sentence and explain what it is about "people who are on average making less than $145 a month" that makes the abuse you are getting from them specifically unbelievable? (edit: Wow, -3 after only 20 minutes?... I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect. I think that's the fastest downvoting I have gotten, even contrasted with when I say negative things about Apple, Signal, or Rust. I highly recommend thinking hard about what it means to believe that it is ever appropriate to speak with as much disdain about people who are struggling as Quequao just did... it was frankly downright shameful.)
- gostsamo 5y ago
  Such people would not bother to put so much effort in spam and abuse for a reward of $136.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  You're getting downvoted because you made a bad faith assumption in a way that comes off as hostile. > I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect. They don't, they hate people who make that assumption.
  - rualca 5y ago
    > You're getting downvoted because you made a bad faith assumption in a way that comes off as hostile. I confirm that was precisely the reason why I downvoted that post. Not only does that post indicate the poster failed to read and understand OP's post but the poster's comment suggests the misunderstanding was disingenuous and intended to put up a strawman designed to gratuitously attack OP with pseudo-moralist arguments.
- jcims 5y ago
  The point isn’t that they are ‘only’ making $145 a month. It’s that people are willing to be abusive to other humans over it. It’s like those annoying relatives that are willing to throw away any authenticity in their relationship with you in order to hustle their shitty MLM product that is making them next to nothing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pseudo0 5y ago
Maybe they're thinking about the thousands of dollars they aren't (but could be) making rather than the $145 they are? From that delusional perspective, you're costing them untold potential income.
- ptr2voidStar 5y ago
  The human mind is indeed fascinating
formerly_proven 5y ago
Due to stigmatization policies they can't use the normal ad channels to advertise their patreon, so it only makes sense to go the "organic content" route. And from their PoV they are sticking to the rules of the relevant subreddits, yet still get their content deleted or banned. I don't find it surprising people get upset when viewing the situation from their side.
- graeme 5y ago
  I’m a moderator. Very likely you’re wrong. Anything systematic like that is probably generated by a system where someone wrote a script of common phrases and handed it off to low wage labour to write. Highly doubt any actual creator is doing that. The payoff of untargeted spam is so low! Only makes sense if it’s outsourced at scale like any garden variety spam ring. The usual and profitable way people promote their onlyfans on reddit is by posting pictures and videos.
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    I think OP was referring to cases like OF creators posting to places like r/roastme where thirsty redditors can see that they're hot, check out their profile, and see the pinned link to their OFs. That kind of thing is not likely to be automated.
  - OnlyFriendsThwy 5y ago
    How systematic are you talking? I happen to know an OF creator who promotes herself that way and she doesn't do anything in an automatic fashion, just creates her own submissions to subreddits and gets burned by such moderators. I happen to agree with formerly_proven . When my OF friend described how she submitted topical stuff to subreddits in the hopes that others would follow up on her profile, I was like, "what's wrong with that? Isn't that how people are supposed to promote themselves? Giving out free, relevant stuff in the hopes you'll want to know more about them?" I mean, isn't that how ethical self-promotion is supposed to work? Join a community, obey their norms, contribute, and if they like you, they'll follow up? How do you expect it to work? <insert caveat about how you have no reason to believe this experience, since the sensitivity of the issue requires me to use a throwaway and hide her identity as well>
55555 5y ago
They often have pimps who run the social media marketing.
lucb1e 5y ago
I was concluding the opposite: all that abuse is probably because it's only a few bucks a day with advertising. Without the abuse they'd probably rarely get anything.
tsss 5y ago
$145 a month just for being born a woman and taking a few pictures. Basically free money. Who wouldn't do it?
zibzab 5y ago
Some subs now ban posters that are on OF regardless of the post content.

Dylan16807 5y ago

> The median take-home revenue is $136 per month. If you value a creator’s time at a $15 minimum wage, the median creator needs to be spending less than 9 hours per month on her OnlyFans to break even. > Relative to effort, it looks like most accounts lose money. I guess you could assume that. But I'm not convinced without data. If you asked me whether I expect the median OnlyFans creator to spend more or less than 10 hours a month, I'd definitely guess less. I'd expect there to be a lot of inactive or barely active accounts.

sofixa 5y ago
Furthermore, the author is assuming the creator is in the US, which isn't a given. There are countries where $136/month is a fairly decent living.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- csomar 5y ago
  With the current food prices, there are no countries where $136/month is a fairly decent living. Countries where $150/month is the average salary are a hellish place to live in.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Current food prices where?
    - csomar 5y ago
      The food prices in most countries follow the international prices of several commodities. If cars, and gas are more expensive, then food becomes more expensive in most parts of the world.
      - watwut 5y ago
        There are serious differences between food prices around the world. They may change with gas prices, but that does not make them the same.

intricatedetail 5y ago

Why those people are not treated as employees and paid at least a minimum wage?

sebzim4500 5y ago
How would that even work? Only Fans has no idea how much time these people are spending doing 'marketing' (spamming reddit)
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  Like any other employment. Can you be more precise?
  - gambiting 5y ago
    No, can you be more precise? Do you know how OnlyFans works? It’s like reading that majority of seller accounts on eBay make less than $145 a month and then replying that they should be treated like employees - employees of who? eBay? OnlyFans lets you sell your content online, just like you would on eBay or Etsy - if you want to make more money then…make more content? Or make content that people want to buy? I don’t even understand whose employees you think they should be in this scenario.
    - intricatedetail 5y ago
      Isn't that the same as taking overtime as an employee? They are working for the benefit of OF. It's like saying a factory let's you assemble phones and if you want to make more money assemble more.
      - morelikeborelax 5y ago
        Onlyfans is a service not a content provider or media company. What you are suggesting is akin to Shopify, Etsy or eBay paying a minimum wage to sellers.
      - 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

that's ... a lot? compared to $0 most posted videos make, especially porn videos. Onlyfans should expand to non-nsfw content and bring people over from youtube. It's a different monetization model when the ad revenue option is not available.

dijit 5y ago
I have genuinely looked at OnlyFans for content which is not sex related, since it's a large name and I'm becoming increasingly disenfranchised with youtube. One issue though is that discoverability is very poor on OnlyFans. I suspect this is what causes "OnlyFans Spam" on places like reddit. OnlyFans has little incentive to fix that though, as everyone spamming is basically advertising their platform externally. So, lose/lose?
- michaelt 5y ago
  Other paid-content platforms - like Patreon and Substack - also seem pretty light on discoverability. I'm not sure why that is.
  - hexa22 5y ago
    You don’t find people on patreon, you find them on other platforms and then pay money typically for some way to interact with big personalities. I doubt there is much demand for scrolling through an index page of strangers to pay them money.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    maybe because most overly puplic communities turn into cesspits?
  - dvh 5y ago
    I know why, look at the front page of bitschute (or however it is spelled). It's full of conspiracy and extremists videos, if only fan showed popular stuff it would be 100% porn.
  - deleted 5y ago

orthoxerox 5y ago

I'm sure similar income distribution applies to all user-generated digital content platforms like YT, Patreon, Twitch, etc. A few superstars that make crazy money, some professionals who use the platform as their main source of income and a long thin tail of amateurs. The market is supersaturated now, even with the obesity epidemic there are so many college girls with perfect figures willing to bare everything for $10 a month that choosing among them is a challenge.

thatguy0900 5y ago
The market seems past supersaturated, theres more college girls with perfect bodies willing to bare everything for free than youll be able to watch in your lifetime
GrumpyNl 5y ago
Its all about the whales. On dating chats we had some whales who would spend around 7-10k a month.
- kfprt 5y ago
  This doc from the NYT mentions the whales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY
Applejinx 5y ago
Can confirm. I make my living on Patreon, but I am in the top 100 worldwide in the 'music' category (I write open source DSP plugins) and I make a bit over $2000 a month. It falls away very very rapidly: top ten worldwide is what people envision for 'making good money' and is competitive with say a career software developer in the 90s or 00s. Top hundred worldwide is 'getting by pretty comfortably if you don't live anywhere significant, especially if you still qualify for food stamps or what have you', and it's competitive with what a career software developer will be making by 2030 or 2040 at the most. Top thousand worldwide is already down to your $200 a month or so, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on these platforms. This is the nature of markets in an attention economy that scales worldwide: you're getting squeezed out by anybody anywhere, and if you're a niche (I'm a niche, but not alone in it: by now, there's another plugin dev who is pushing harder for money and making more than me, who is also Patreon-exclusive) then that limits the maximum size you can scale. It's absolutely going to be the same on OnlyFans, Twitch, etc. As a job mostly this sort of thing is 'spend a bunch of money to operate at a competitive level, and then you don't earn anything to speak of'. This IS free market dynamics in a state of maximum globalized low friction. Silicon Valley has spent a lot of time selling people on low friction interaction and discoverability. Tearing down the walls means you're competing with the girl with a perfect figure who's in New Delhi and has family money backing her (for whatever reason), and her competing with you means you work less. When this seriously kicks in for the very software devs who've created this situation (and it may have been inevitable, let's not directly blame) and AI begins to compete with human workers at content creation and software development, the OnlyFans/Patreon/Twitch picture becomes the world, and at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability. A lot of these platforms are sustained by whales. I'd do substantially better (but would ruin my positioning) if I targeted whales.

lazyjones 5y ago

> One important thing this analysis of public data misses is tipping. A substantial proportion of the top accounts’ revenue comes from tips I suppose this makes the whole headline somewhat dubious.

alkonaut 5y ago

Should this be compared to a “job” or to YouTube or Podcasts? I’d expect there to be a tiny majority making a living, then another tiny majority making anything more than peanuts, and finally a massive tail of accounts that are inactive, only posts sporadically and so on. It would be interesting to see the stats for users that actually try to live off it, such as a set of accounts publishing at least X hours of material per week for the last 100 weeks.

Lazare 5y ago

So... the punchline here seems to be the median revenue per content creator. Except: 1) The denominator is skewed by a large number of people who signed up but aren't seriously pursuing it, and may not even be active. 2) The numerator is skewed by the fact that this omits tips entirely, and much of the sample is missing the subscription price or the number of subscribers, so numbers had to be guessed. So in other words, the $145/mo was calculated by taking one number we know is wrong, and dividing by another number we know is wrong. ...offhand, I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. I have to give props to the author; they're quite clear in the analysis section that they're missing all the data they need ("...many accounts don't have their number of fans available", "[using likes] as a proxy for number of fans [...] is likely an underestimate", many accounts had several subscription tiers). But given all the caveats, I don't think there's anything left to conclude.

formerly_proven 5y ago
It seems more like a Fermi estimate.
- hansvm 5y ago
  > I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans. > Fermi estimate It's more like a Fermi estimate, but the inputs still probably aren't good enough to be meaningful. E.g., on other set-your-own-hours platforms like doordash, MLM pyramid schemes, and uber it's expected that 99% of the workers won't work more than a few hours per month (this is also a bad Fermi estimate -- could be off by 10x either direction). As a corollary, just taking the $145 and multiplying by 100ish (based also on your definition of full-time) could be a much better estimate for the earnings potential for somebody looking to seriously pursue OnlyFans. Pendantic note: the point here isn't that $14,500 is a better estimate; it's that the magnitude of all the unknowns in trying to compute such a thing is so great that we can't even reach the level of certainty a Fermi approximation provides without more data.
vbtemp 5y ago
Yeah, I read that over too - crap data in, crap analysis, and crap results out. There's a lot that's wrong with the article: - Someone else in this thread correctly highlighted that on stackoverflow, for example, simply having one answer to a question puts you in the top 25th percentile. Most accounts are probably idle or passive or abandoned, so using those to get the result is obviously wrong. Maybe, what are the expected earnings for users investing more than 8 hours/week (purchasing equipment, producing content, editing, publishing, marketing)? - People on this thread need to stop looking at the $145/month figure from the title. It doesn't come from anything. A lot of people are kind of stuck on that. By no means what so ever should it be interpreted as "girls who have only fans make $145/month", which people seem to be doing. Based on the income distribution, virtually no one makes approximately $145/month. It's just an artifact being the quotient of two numbers the author chose. A small-ish proportion of total users make _way more than $145/month_, and a large proportion of the user base (including idle and abandoned accounts) makes pretty much zero. Maybe I'm just broadcasting my lack of statistical knowledge, but I'm struggling to understand what does an average or median even signify for extremely long-tailed, skewed distributions? - And finally, if one is making a serious analysis - lots of jokes and euphemisms about masturbation and theatrical contempt for the consumers - seem to suggest either discomfort on the part of the author or some kind of motivated reasoning to arrive at their results.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

user5994461 5y ago

Average and median have little meaning when most accounts never make any content. We can compare to stackoverflow that probably has similar economics. - There are 15.236M accounts on stack overflow. - Only 4.046M accounts have more than one reputation, that's equivalent to one answer or two. - 1.095M accounts have more than 1000 reputation. That was very easy if you started in the first few years of stack overflow, or is quite a bit of participation nowadays. - 0.232M accounts have more than 2000 reputation. Main take away, you can be top 26% percentile for posting a single answer or question.

ianai 5y ago
Sheesh that abuse of powers of ten notation. Is this common?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  I don't see any powers of ten notation? And using the same unit for all the account numbers is a very good thing.
  - user5994461 5y ago
    I edited

bhalina 5y ago

Seems like Medium. Isn't all of the internet like this? Accounts at the top make exponentially more?

anovikov 5y ago

I did similar analysis for Upwork and results were much much more drastic. Like, vast majority of accounts never earning anything, and a bunch of multimillion dollar accounts (most of them probably suggesting scams or money laundering - that was before i became a $2M account myself lol), and majority of money made by people who make very little, <$1000 per month, but stubbornly trying for years and years, probably having no other way out. Grim picture.

ivrrimum 5y ago
Have been doing full time freelancing for past 4 years on Upwork. I make good money and definitely not $1k a month, there are a lot of bot accounts on Upwork, which i think pollutes the data set.
dvh 5y ago
Why grim? I work 1h a day and earn just enough to get by. Before I worked in a normal job 8h a day plus 2h commute, that was grim.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  You would be one of the whales. Also, depending on what you do for that hour, as an entrepreneur you might be drastically underestimating the time and attention commitment you make.
datenhorst 5y ago
What's the story of you becoming a $2M account yourself?
- anovikov 5y ago
  No story really. Just a lot of grind, developing a niche, finding my perfect model of clients, building a site, a boxed product to sell, and a large library of copy-paste code, working fixed price, working with good recruiters to get good cheap coders. Gradual progress. Took 10 years to get from 50K to 500K per year.

dyeje 5y ago

I imagine it follows a similar distribution as something like Substack.

lavajava 5y ago

It's wise to already be in the shovel business during a gold rush. It's harder to figure out what the next big thing will be.

rm_-rf_slash 5y ago

Article was posted April 2020. The numbers today are probably much higher with little change in overall proportions.

gccs 5y ago

This is the same for all parts of the economy and human condition. A small percentage of people produce nearly everything of value.

antirez 5y ago

145/mo for most accounts is incredibly high. Take, for instance, what happens with Youtube: most people there do 5$/mo.

xyzzy21 5y ago

A lot like how Uber and Lyft do more to oppress and impoverish than raise wealth for client laborers.

thow16161 5y ago

The lack of transparency and discoverability on OF is a pain for both subscribers and creators. And the creators do work really hard. My ex-sugar gf is an OF creator. I was with her when she started (transitioned from MyFreeCams where I met her, and brought some of her members with her). She worked her ass off to claw her way to the top 3% which is where she was when I broke things off with her. She spent way, way more time on social media, promoting herself and her brand, than she did actually making content. There are groups of creators that promote each other's social media & content on twitter and ig, and its critical to get hooked into one of those groups to succeed if you're not already a major IG or Twitter star with millions of followers. Even at 3%, she was not making a huge amount of $$. I wish OF had more transparency around how the percentages relate to actual income..

failwhaleshark 5y ago

I had two, now one because they moved in with their fiancee, neighbors who made more than rent ($1500/month) on OF. The now one isn't very good looking, spent $15k on plastic surgery, and they still look very lumpy/dumpy. (K of FMK.) I think what this small sample-size shows is it's all about marketing / influencing creating audience-driven-content if they are determined and consistent, even if the talent isn't all that. There are apparently enough lonely/horny men to fund this sort of business model when the talent is savvy enough to monetize. I'm sure the vast majority of accounts are under-monetized talent, inconsistent, hobbyists, or they gave-up and did something else for income.

walrus01 5y ago

The author of this piece seems to take an overly moralistic and salacious approach to how they present the subject matter.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Democrats want a 99% cut of OnlyFans.