What's the Story with the Online Platform OnlyFans?

What's the Story with the Online Platform OnlyFans?

This article relates to Margo's Got Money Troubles

In Margo's Got Money Troubles, Margo begins creating content on OnlyFans, which eventually becomes quite lucrative work. But what is OnlyFans? Is it a pornography hub? Is it even legal?

OnlyFans was started in London, England. It is a subscription-based online platform with messaging features. It basically acts as a video-hosting site, like YouTube, but its content creators can upload their own videos and put them behind a paywall. Their subscribers can then pay them monthly fees to access their videos, send them financial "tips," or pay on a pay-per-view basis. This setup grants the people creating the videos full control over who watches their videos and how much they will be paid each time someone accesses their work. Creators earn 80 percent of the income generated by their videos, and reportedly earn an average of $1,300 a year. Some of them, of course, earn significantly more than this.

One might think that this kind of setup would work for a variety of content creators, from visual artists to musicians. However, although many celebrity and influencer content creators on OnlyFans do provide videos on topics ranging from exercise instruction to music performance, the vast majority of OnlyFans creators use their platform to provide sexual content.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the website took off in popularity, gathering over 170,000 new users per day. As of May 2023, OnlyFans had more than three million registered creators and 220 million registered users.

There has been some controversy over allegations of whether OnlyFans provides a portal for underage users or for children to show up in content. The company claims that their platform is designed to keep children out and explains that their technology is designed to scan for any images of children in videos. However, in May 2021, the BBC reported that OnlyFans was "failing to prevent underage users from selling and appearing in explicit videos," and in August of the same year, the United States Congress began an investigation of the company.

In October 2021, largely due to pressure from banks and credit card companies, the company announced that they would ban sexually explicit material. This decision was reversed only a few days later as users and creators protested; at that point, OnlyFans announced that they'd be able to resume the explicit content "due to banking partners' assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators."

In researching her novel, Rufi Thorpe interviewed a number of OnlyFans sexual content creators. Why did she decide to focus on OnlyFans? As she noted in an interview, "When OnlyFans started taking off during the pandemic, it seemed to fit into this really interesting morally gray area where people were just a little bit less quick to judge, and I saw my chance."

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Margo's Got Money Troubles. It originally ran in November 2024 and has been updated for the June 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.