If your goal is to consume adult content, then you can get it in massive amounts for free, and without using an app.
If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling when you compare them to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.
I don't use OnlyFans personally, but I can clearly see the appeal of it. Right up front is the personal connection, these creators are posting updates on their lives and their looks and more traditional content daily. It's like a watered down girlfriend experience. And that's also how it's marketed, you pay specifically for the person you're interested in, not to some shady porn production company that swaps out actors every other film. Of course this money goes through OnlyFans, but it's a lot more transparent.
I think that feeling of personal connection and more direct involvement is a complement to our modern lifestyle, and a very sharp contrast with the "oh my lord, I can see her bare ankles" sort of content that media like Playboy were based on.
And the average monthly earnings say absolutely nothing, setting up an OnlyFans takes very little effort, so the average is heavily skewed to non-committal or non-talented producers. What I've heard is that very average producers make serious money on the platform, I bet if you take the top 10.000 producers on OF, and you compare the top 10.000 porn actors, you'll find that the OF producers make a lot more money on average.
> If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling
That “average”, as is pointed out every time the statistic gets raised including when the story focusing on it was itself on HN, both includes conpletely inactive accounts and excludes tips—which are a significant (possibly the major) source of income for most performers—so it has nothing to do with the actual experience of active content producers on the site.
Your average porn girl might make more to start, but unless they really take off, they aren't making very much. Also they get paid per shoot, not based on views. With OF they get monthly recurring revenue for their content. Performers can chat with their admirers to keep them interested and it's more of a patron/artist relationship I guess. With OF, they also have full control over the content they make, when it goes out, how long it stays out there and all that.
For viewers, it's definitely harder to browse than a regular porn site or pornhub or something, but if you end up finding a few pages you like, chatting, buying mementos. It becomes a lot more immersive than just scrolling around an ocean of videos.
Platforms like onlyfans sell two products. They sell safe/clean sex work to a variety of people who would never get into regular sex work. And they sell the feeling of mattering and a sense of human connection to people who suffer from loneliness.
The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for that though, maybe it’s hard to keep the same subscribers?
Are you suggesting content creators should run their own website? If they have the time & skills, sure. But running your own website is expensive in both time and money.
It's not expensive, difficult or very time consuming to have a static website connected to a email marketing or newsletter service in order to communicate directly to people and improve the services offered. Basic marketing strategy. There's no need to run the entire business on their own.
It absolutely is, because you still need to get paid, and unfortunately 18-20% fees are completely normal for adult-content payment processing. And OF clearly does a lot more than just payment processing.
Each one of those things can be done for free until a certain point (e-mail marketing) or completely free (static sites/hosting). Feel free to ping me if you need concrete examples of services that can do that – and there are many.
You seem to greatly underestimate what it takes to run such a business, both from the content creator and business owner pov. This reminds me of the “I can build facebook over the weekend” argument.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm a creator too. I was talking about the marketing side of the business only and not about substitution of the those platforms.
>The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform.
Discoverability. The same reason why Youtube content creators stick with the platform.
Do people join onlyfans and then find models? I always assumed most of the marketing took place on other platforms like Instagram.
My YouTube thing may be broken from the amount or miniature painting videos I watch, but I rarely get a suggestion for anything that I haven’t visited before. Well except for that world of Warcraft streamer asmodal even though I haven’t played world of Warcraft since the burning crusade something like 10 years ago. Most of those miniature channels have patrons which I guess is similar to onlyfans, but I would’ve frankly never known about neither their YouTube channels or patrons if I hadn’t seen their stuff on Reddit’s miniature painting or blood bowl subreddits first, and from there they might as well have lead me to their own sites. Which most of the more successful painters actually do.
I have no clue. My guess is that the platform is a known entity and users are comfortable engaging with other sellers on it, opposed to one-off markets. I also guess that there is cross collaboration and references and search ability
I'm sure everybody has their reasons. But on your second point. My guess is that the $180 average on OF is WAY higher than the Average monthly income on any other site for this type of content. Some workers may earn massively more on other sites, but certainly not the majority.
> ~$180 average monthly earnings … compare to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.
That is not a valid comparison. Some OF publishers probably make that much in a day. Comparing the average on one venue to the outliers of another doesn't really tell you anything useful.
Furthermore, I suspect most traditional porn work is paid per shoot with nothing per view or per repeat, and there are relatively limited opportunities for fresh shoots because of the reusability of the content from each shoot. OF is a completely different model, the recurring income is likely to be considerably more significant than one-off income in that model. You'd have to do some proper analysis on figures gathered over months (or longer) to get any useful picture comparing overall income from these platforms.
Additionally, OF less likely involves interacting with people you don't know, in environments you are not familiar with, and other potential safety or level-of-ickyness concerns, so money is not the only consideration.
> compare to traditional porn
And another thing: Cam girls have been around for decades. OF in the sense being discussed here is traditional porn of a sort.
I went with "probably" or if laziness - a more definite statement would have required a bit if fact checking research as I don't want to be one of those people!
Your mistake is thinking that porn is a generic concept that people consume. Almost no one would not be satisfied with a generic porn channel that showed random content of random ages, random body types, random genders, etc. Everyone has some criteria when it comes to porn they consume. Some people just have more specific criteria than others.
It's literally no different from YouTube/Twitch/etc: people see the big earners and think "hey, I could do that" without realizing it's a pyramid scheme.
The appeal is it’s easy for women to become online prostitutes and make ridiculous money from incels and sexual predators. I thought women could aspire to something more than this but I guess this is progress although regressive.
If your goal is to consume adult content, then you can get it in massive amounts for free, and without using an app.
If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling when you compare them to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.