A staple tabloid story in recent times has been the Only Fans rags to riches yarn, wherein our plucky heroine, often a former cubicle drone or till girl at the supermarket, packs in her life of drudgery for the freedom of posting saucy pics on Only Fans, and instantly reaps lottery cheque money.
However, these almost weekly tales of smut instamillionaires simply don’t add up, despite the ubiquitous pics of lasses in their smalls posing in mcmansions or draped over luxury cars. In fact, the OnlyFans millionaire story is one of the great alternative histories of our times. Or to put it another words, more fake news.
OnlyFans, like most things in the attention economy, functions on a hockey stick graph. A very small number of users make nearly all the money, in other words.
This latest yarn may be a tad more honest than most, claiming to be in the top 2% of earners on the site (as do they all) but only stating an income of approx £1,000 a week, far below the usual footballer salaries claimed by her peers. Interestingly, her testimony matches the analysis done by TSNFA as we can see on the graph.
If this one is remotely correct, we can assume that almost no one other than established porn stars or former Hollywood people are making six figures annually. There have been a few macroeconomics analyses of OnlyFans which seem to concur with this. Here’s the latest.
Which suggests in turn that most of those cubicle-to-camgirls are bringing in a few hundred a week at most, but are prepared to amplify their income a hundredfold if it gets them a mention in the redtops, which they hope in turn might bring in a few more punters. In fact, if TSNFA’s version of the OnlyFans hockey graph is correct (above) then about 95% of OnlyFans users are making less than $1,000 a month.
Also, there’s likely a certain amount of ego protection in this too. If you strip for cameras, you’d like to think that it was worth more than the market may necessarily provide. But you can salve that ego by ‘faking it till you make it’, claiming the money you want to be making in the hope that somehow the headlines make it true. This is somewhere between cosmic wishing and casting spells in terms of career strategy, but doesn’t make it any less prevalent.
All in, I’m unconvinced about the morality of this. It’s just page three without payment. And it’s selling a dream of financial freedom which pretty much doesn’t exist. Journalists ought to be doing their due diligence and demanding to see bank statements before publishing such claims.
