In the polite circles of Silicon Valley, when people want to discuss how creators build and monetize audiences, people like to talk about companies like Patreon and Substack. What they should be talking about is the adult-entertainment subscription service OnlyFans.
OnlyFans’ scale and cultural relevance have exploded during the pandemic, as people look for both new ways to earn money and new forms of digital entertainment.
For that reason, OnlyFans offers lessons about digital content monetization and the future of subscription media.
1. OnlyFans creators leverage free social media explicitly and unabashedly as a lead-generation tool for paid premium media. This changes the nature of public social content.
For an earlier generation of content creators, the goal of social media was to build a large following and then generate revenue from that audience through paid promotions or, for the largest stars, selling some sort of branded product. The goal was scale above all else.
The OnlyFans generation of creators, in contrast, use social media like Instagram and TikTok to reach and cultivate followers and convert them to subscribers.
This use case for social media leads creators to prioritize going deep on specific niches and making content that has the potential to deeply engage a small number of people, rather than going purely for scale.
What this means in practical terms is that adult-oriented creators use the mass social services to post less explicit content, and then direct their audiences to OnlyFans for more hardcore content and connection.
It also means that the type of media they post isn’t about mass appeal, but instead is about niche (and sometimes bizarre) community appeal. This type of content doesn’t make the creators famous. But when filtered through algorithms like TikTok’s Discover, it puts them in front of the people who are likely to care deeply about their niche and are prime candidates for conversion to a paid relationship.
2. OnlyFans as a platform treats subscription as a key qualification step toward higher-priced paid messaging and content opportunities.
When people usually think about subscription monetization, getting a user to subscribe is the end goal, and once they are subscribed the goal is to retain them.
In the OnlyFans ecosystem, however, subscribing to a creator is simply another step in the monetization funnel.
A user subscribes to a creator for premium content, but that subscription doesn’t unlock everything. Instead, creators can post content that requires separate payments per post or charge their subscribers incrementally for personal messaging.
This moves what a subscription represents from being the way the creator monetizes to being just an important step in the funneling process—where the user demonstrates willingness to pay for content and puts a credit card on file to use for more purchases.
This is the likely direction in which other content monetization platforms will move, simply because the best source for creator monetization is the super fan. Charging only a subscription fee is not taking full advantage of the potential value of those super fans. In a world of niche content and monetizing deep engagement, the goal of a creator has to be to treat a basic subscription as just one ring of monetization, and to entice the most dedicated and engaged community members—the insiders—to pay more and more.
3. OnlyFans creators generally charge shockingly high subscription rates compared to the prices for other types of content.
OnlyFans subscriptions are not cheap. In many cases, run-of-the-mill creators charge anywhere from $15 to $30 a month for access to their content, which is far more expensive than what you observe on a platform for monetizing writing, like Substack.
Why are the prices so high? Everything comes down to the realities of the social media marketing funnel that drives OnlyFans.
You start with a social media account, which might have a few thousand followers. Considering the minuscule conversion from free to paid media among those few thousand, creators need to charge a lot per subscriber for participating in OnlyFans to make economic sense.
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that a very good OnlyFans creator can convert 0.5% of their social media followers to a paid account. If the creator charges a $30 a month subscription, that means every 1,000 subscribers on social media are worth about $150 a month in revenue. Given those numbers, someone with 10,000 Instagram followers can make $18,000 a year on OnlyFans, which is a meaningful amount of money from an audience of 50 subscribers (a scale they can invest in nurturing and retaining).
To state the obvious, at $3 a month per subscription, the same economics simply don’t work. To make the same $18,000 a year, the creator would need a 5% conversion to paid rate, which is astronomically high and would require the individual creator to nurture the retention of 500 people. Or they would need 100,000 social media followers—an extremely tall order to achieve.
The upshot is that OnlyFans accounts are expensive because creators need to make a lot of money per person to justify their work. This, I suspect, is a lesson many other people working on, say, newsletters will quickly find out: They need to charge more to support themselves from the small base of true fans they can assemble and nurture.
Of course, understanding why subscriptions are priced so highly from the creator standpoint doesn’t explain why people are willing to pay so much money for a few risqué photos a month against the backdrop of an nearly infinite amount of free porn on the internet. The answer is that for the true fans who subscribe, it seems to be about the individual characters, storylines and niche interests that each creator develops.
4. OnlyFans creators heavily leverage cross-promotion to share engaged leads and subscribers.
OnlyFans creators do a lot of cross-promotion, teaming up and marketing each other’s work to their respective audiences.
This is another thing that makes complete sense in the context of the platform and will in time become more prominent in other forms of paid media.
Cross-promotion makes sense because the entire game for creators is about acquiring qualified leads—people who have demonstrated they are willing to subscribe to similar content.
In the context of free social media, one of the best sources of leads for a creator is the following of a related account. This is nothing new—it’s how pop culture and celebrity have worked for ages.
What is a little more novel, and important, is the cross-promotion relationship between creators, where they get exposure and access to prequalified leads who have already paid for someone else’s content.
For now, these cross-promotions on OnlyFans seem largely to be somewhat casual. But given how valuable the subscription qualification step is, I have to imagine that in time either the OnlyFans platform or the creators themselves will take a more serious look at the value of their audience and ways to effectively sell that prequalified group to new creators.
5. OnlyFans demonstrates the difficulty of differentiation and the resulting tendency toward extremism.
Everyone knows that in 2020 you cannot sell run-of-the-mill titillating or risqué content against the backdrop of an infinite supply of free pornography.
The reality is that OnlyFans creators sell their characters and storylines as a commodity. Thousands of creators are in a race for attention, subscriptions and dollars. This leads them to exploit ever deeper and weirder niches and more extreme behavior to gain a paying audience.
On the internet overall, everything from exercise regimens and stunts to piercings and tattoos is becoming more and more extreme. The same thing goes among OnlyFans creators when it comes to fulfilling the desire for extreme fetishes, subcultures and memes.
This is not a new theme. Science fiction has explored in detail the trope of how a race for the attention of small and deeply engaged audiences can push people toward the far reaches in the expanse of the internet. We are seeing this play out with OnlyFans in real time, with real dollars as the currency.
It is unclear where this scenario will ultimately lead us as a society.
If the early internet was lauded for letting people with niche interests find each other and connect online beyond the confines of drab suburbia, the late internet—and monetization platforms like OnlyFans—is forcing people toward extremes to differentiate themselves.
We should expect this tendency to continue. The fundamental social economics of the internet push people far afield in how they express themselves and their interests.
6. Finally, there is the irony of OnlyFans’ true identity.
One thing that is fascinating about OnlyFans is that because it involves the exchange of real dollars, which opens up plentiful opportunities for scams and fraud, it is ironically the social platform most driven by the mantra “know your customer.” In order to sign up as a creator, you must prove your identity with a full bank, address and license validation process.
This means when it comes to the validation of social media accounts in the real world, OnlyFans creators are some of the most trusted verified accounts on the internet.
There is something deeply ironic about the fact that OnlyFans, a platform for risqué fantasy and characters, is the least likely among social networks to have a problem with fake accounts. You can trust that the creators are real people who have been validated in a way that few other platforms offer.
There is something to learn from this.
First, OnlyFans offers an example of how the desire to get paid for content online smooths the way to validating user identities. There are three major reasons other social services don’t validate the people who participate in their networks. First, the friction of going through the validation process for new accounts prevents people from signing up. Second, it is expensive and time-consuming for services to validate identities. Third, requiring proof of real-world identity is quite exclusionary, as many people can’t easily make that proof. The desire to get paid for content provides a level of motivation that overcomes at least the first two of these hurdles.
At a bigger systems level, the lesson might be that the path toward trusted validation of identities will come through payment systems. I very much hope that we never face a world where someone has to prove their identity in order to share content on the internet; however, the financial system is far more structurally locked down. It seems likely that payments will become the wedge that forces people to validate online identities. That could lead to the creation of an internet environment where it is easier to validate the real-world identity (or at least the valid citizenship) of the people you are interacting with online.
Conclusion
In a lot of ways, the OnlyFans platform is deeply lacking. Compared to modern social networks, its user interface, responsiveness and other features are primitive. Unlike an application like TikTok, the product doesn’t offer anything particularly innovative. The company has a sordid past and a less-than-stellar reputation. So it isn’t clear at all to me that the OnlyFans platform itself will ultimately thrive.
At the same time, its growth is undeniable, as is its cultural relevance. Memes about the platform are spreading across services like TikTok. More and more people are marketing their pages on the service as they look for supplemental income and as internet sex work in various forms becomes increasingly normalized.
So OnlyFans might grow into a powerhouse by hitching a ride on a Covid tailwind, or something else might supplant it.
Either way, there are things to learn from how creators are leveraging the platform that show how social media will evolve, as well as how people will think about growing, engaging and monetizing audiences in the years to come.
Whether you like it or not, the future internet is going to look a lot more like OnlyFans.