This rapidly growing platform represents the creative economy in its most commercial form, where sex is considered just another content that can be turned into profit. Warning: This chart requires JavaScript to be enabled. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. By Drew Harwell on November 9 at 6:00 AM. Share a comment on this story Add it to saved stories Saved somewhere in Florida – in the morning, workers for Bryce Adams’ OnlyFans Empire enter through a secure gate connected to a camera and make their way down a winding road that cost $120,000 to pave, parking their cars outside Adams’s $2.5 million studio office. A large American flag flutters above their office door. A sign featuring Adams wearing tight shorts is also visible from behind.
On OnlyFans, subscribers pay for monthly access to video feeds from creators – many of whom produce sexual content, known as “collaborations” – as well as videos that fans can purchase separately. Being one of the most popular creators on the platform, Adams runs her business like a machine.
Inside, the story designer opens the day’s publishing plans not just for OnlyFans but also for all of their customer feed sites – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. Editors begin to cut the video into short, iterative clips optimized for viral spread. Collaborations get sent to paid fans.
Bryce Adams and her boyfriend, who uses a pseudonym for privacy, were selling baseball equipment online. Now they are making millions as one of the highest-earning accounts on OnlyFans.
Brian Adam, Bryce’s longtime boyfriend (who, like Bryce, uses a pseudonym for privacy), stops at each employee’s desk to review tasks assigned for the day, objecting to any posts or tags that seem “awkward” or “on-brand.” On the office floor, four young women begin texting to paid subscribers of Adams, discussing sex and their personal lives in conversations often exceeding a thousand messages a day.
Since this is a sex business, their workdays are filled with what others might see as debauchery, but they see it as just work: two (or three) people will enter a bedroom next to the kitchen or gym with a video photographer, or just their mobile phones, to record a collaboration or start a live stream while exercising naked.
Then they return to their desks to continue chatting or drive to the beach to create TikToks. After a few days, the video editors will upload the files to OnlyFans servers with names like “Bryce & Holly Shower” or “Sex on a Jungle Trail,” priced at $25 for the scene.
Adams’ staff calls their headquarters in central Florida “the farm.” Purchased last year with OnlyFans money, it contains 10 acres of farmland that previously housed a grove of pecan trees. Their team displays a flag showing what they call “her signature pose.” They recorded her lying in the fresh concrete for a TikTok video, alongside the handprints of their staff.
Her only cash crop now is attention, and Adams’ business outperforms most American farms. The company generates an estimated $10 million in annual revenue, and many of the working duo earn higher wages than regular farms; the total monthly payroll of the company exceeds a million dollars.
“People don’t understand the scale of the opportunity. I mean, really: you can create your own world,” Adams, 30, said as she strolled the grounds in denim shorts and a sleeveless shirt. “This is our job. This is our life.”
In the U.S. creator economy, there is no platform as direct or efficient as OnlyFans. Since its launch in 2016, the social site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most organized and lucrative tiers of the online influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, opening up a level of wealth previously unimaginable.
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Of the 3 million creators currently publishing worldwide on OnlyFans, which has 230 million “fan” subscribers—a global audience roughly equivalent to one-third of the size of the United States itself, according to the company’s report in August.
Thanks to the pandemic that isolated people in their homes, total fan payments to creators last year rose to $5.5 billion—more than what all online influencers in the United States earned from advertising that year, according to an analysis of the creator economy this spring by Goldman Sachs Research.
If the earnings of creators on OnlyFans are considered collectively, the company would rank around 90th on Forbes’ list of the largest private companies in America by revenue, surpassing Twitter (now called X), the Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International, and Hallmark Cards.
On the surface, OnlyFans is a simple operation: fans (mostly men) pay to scroll through a feed of images and videos (mostly of women), with some perks offered at an extra cost, like chatting live with the creator or customized videos based on fan requests. However, not all of its content is explicit, and the company itself brands that it is the only social network that is “openly inclusive of all types of creators.”
OnlyFans creators are classified as independent contractors of the platform, which provides essential tools for content publishing and client acquisition and takes 20 percent of creators’ revenue. OnlyFans sends 1099 forms to the Internal Revenue Service and all American creators earning over $600 annually to ensure they pay taxes on all income. (Adams said her company paid about $1.3 million in taxes last year.)
With the allure of financial freedom and the challenge of standing out, many OnlyFans creators have started running themselves as independent media businesses, complete with support teams, growth strategies, and promotional budgets, employing cold outreach and data analytics for online marketing to create a fantastical life.
The subscription site has often been dismissed as a punchline in tabloid news, a sleazy corner of the internet where young women (teachers, nurses, and police officers) sell nude photos, only to be discovered and lose their jobs. However, OnlyFans has increasingly become the model by which a new generation of online creators are getting paid. Influencers famous on mainstream sites use OnlyFans to monetize the audiences they’ve spent years building. OnlyFans creators have turned virality on major social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok as sales channels to draw new viewers to subscribe.
For years, U.S. social media companies have touted virality as the ultimate goal, distributing metrics of followers, interactions, and hearts with an implicit promise: that online love can be transformed into sponsorships and promotional deals. But OnlyFans represents the creative economy at its most commercialized—an arena where viewers pay upfront for creators’ work, with intimacy merely another unit of content for profit.
The rapid rise of OnlyFans also highlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern freelance work that creators see as safe, remote, and self-directed, according to Bani Brar, an associate professor and director of the SexTech Lab at The New School in New York, who has made interviewing digital sex workers a focal point of his research.
Report by Drew Harwell. Photos by Sydney Walsh. Video by Whitney Leiming. Design and development by Emma Comer. Design editing by Chloe Meister. Photo editing by Monique Woo. Video editing by Julia Woll. Video production by Jessica Kusielniak.
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