The Economics of OnlyFans: Most accounts make less than $145/mo
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1) The denominator is skewed by a large number of people who signed up but aren't seriously pursuing it, and may not even be active.
2) The numerator is skewed by the fact that this omits tips entirely, and much of the sample is missing the subscription price or the number of subscribers, so numbers had to be guessed.
So in other words, the $145/mo was calculated by taking one number we know is wrong, and dividing by another number we know is wrong. ...offhand, I'm not sure I've obtained any information about the expected earnings of someone trying to post content to OnlyFans.
I have to give props to the author; they're quite clear in the analysis section that they're missing all the data they need ("...many accounts don't have their number of fans available", "[using likes] as a proxy for number of fans [...] is likely an underestimate", many accounts had several subscription tiers). But given all the caveats, I don't think there's anything left to conclude.
> Fermi estimate
It's more like a Fermi estimate, but the inputs still probably aren't good enough to be meaningful. E.g., on other set-your-own-hours platforms like doordash, MLM pyramid schemes, and uber it's expected that 99% of the workers won't work more than a few hours per month (this is also a bad Fermi estimate -- could be off by 10x either direction). As a corollary, just taking the $145 and multiplying by 100ish (based also on your definition of full-time) could be a much better estimate for the earnings potential for somebody looking to seriously pursue OnlyFans.
Pendantic note: the point here isn't that $14,500 is a better estimate; it's that the magnitude of all the unknowns in trying to compute such a thing is so great that we can't even reach the level of certainty a Fermi approximation provides without more data.
- Someone else in this thread correctly highlighted that on stackoverflow, for example, simply having one answer to a question puts you in the top 25th percentile. Most accounts are probably idle or passive or abandoned, so using those to get the result is obviously wrong. Maybe, what are the expected earnings for users investing more than 8 hours/week (purchasing equipment, producing content, editing, publishing, marketing)?
- People on this thread need to stop looking at the $145/month figure from the title. It doesn't come from anything. A lot of people are kind of stuck on that. By no means what so ever should it be interpreted as "girls who have only fans make $145/month", which people seem to be doing. Based on the income distribution, virtually no one makes approximately $145/month. It's just an artifact being the quotient of two numbers the author chose. A small-ish proportion of total users make _way more than $145/month_, and a large proportion of the user base (including idle and abandoned accounts) makes pretty much zero. Maybe I'm just broadcasting my lack of statistical knowledge, but I'm struggling to understand what does an average or median even signify for extremely long-tailed, skewed distributions?
- And finally, if one is making a serious analysis - lots of jokes and euphemisms about masturbation and theatrical contempt for the consumers - seem to suggest either discomfort on the part of the author or some kind of motivated reasoning to arrive at their results.
The numerator is the median revenue and the denominator is the number of content creators.
You’ve got the median of an undercount of revenue, across a population padded with an unknown number of not-actively-used accounts, each of which, on its own, would result in an artificially low result compared to the actual value of interest.
However, so many of these accounts advertise their sex work by posting content that ostensibly complies with the community rules but which somehow encourages other users to look at their user profile to find the NSFW content and then become shockingly objectionable when their content is removed, that we've been obliged to implement a blanket ban on all of that sort of account and now use a bot to find it.
I can't believe I've been subjected to the level of abuse I'm getting from people who are on average making less than $145 a month.
I lived by myself on welfare in the last 12 months of university, and my rent was $175 per week, welfare was $175 per week, and I had $3,000 saved to last the year. So I lived on effectively $100 a week after rent and electricity.
There was a period of time my rent was more than my wage $725/month vs $700. I was subsisting off of unlocking phones for people (who those mostly didn't want to do it themselves or didn't trust themselves), dumpster[1] pizza, and the ~$200 a month extra I was able to make ($20 an unlock) was my utilities and non-dumpster-pizza food money.
[1] Literally, from a dumpster. Most local pizza places aren't run by douchebags and tend to put the leftovers in their own bag/box for the poor to consume. I truly appreciated it (much love to Hot Lips in particular), as Pizza was a luxury way beyond anything I could afford at the time.
So, hinting that they're a woman on reddit?
Can you unpack this sentence and explain what it is about "people who are on average making less than $145 a month" that makes the abuse you are getting from them specifically unbelievable?
(edit: Wow, -3 after only 20 minutes?... I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect. I think that's the fastest downvoting I have gotten, even contrasted with when I say negative things about Apple, Signal, or Rust. I highly recommend thinking hard about what it means to believe that it is ever appropriate to speak with as much disdain about people who are struggling as Quequao just did... it was frankly downright shameful.)
> I guess people on HN apparently really hate the idea that people who happen to be poorer than us deserve respect.
They don't, they hate people who make that assumption.
I confirm that was precisely the reason why I downvoted that post. Not only does that post indicate the poster failed to read and understand OP's post but the poster's comment suggests the misunderstanding was disingenuous and intended to put up a strawman designed to gratuitously attack OP with pseudo-moralist arguments.
The other thing is that it the average abuser and average account have likely quite different profiles. Average account will have much higher amount of passive accounts that owner don't care about anymore.
In this case, you have to look at the investment people make into getting that $145. Creators are very invested, and the $145 is often in itself a huge source of disappointment and frustration. Imagine being sold being superstardom and a life of luxury and getting $145 (which probably doesn't cover your costs) and having random people complement you in public on how you look naked. I think I'd be a little frustrated, too had I fell for that.
> It’s like those annoying relatives that are willing to throw away any authenticity in their relationship with you in order to hustle their shitty MLM product that is making them next to nothing.
The are being exploited by the MLM, who sold a dream of business success, self-realization and wealth. Usually at a time in their life where they were in a state of financial failure. Like the exploited creator, they often spend thousands to get hundreds and end up being socially humiliated by their attempts at lead generation.
The irony in all of it is that for some it works.
It's worse than that. 99% of people in MLMs lose money.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_com...
If a mod has to deal with repeated vitriol from people making money indirectly from the platform, it seems reasonable for them to assume that the amount of money at stake is more than a few dollars per day.
It was about “why is this small amount worth so much aggravation?!” not “why is this poor beggar bothering me?!”
"I've been getting abused by people promoting OF content. I assumed they were doing this because it made them thousands and thousands of dollars and they were making a living doing it, but if they're only making $145 per month from their OF account, then why do they care so much?"
(The obvious objection here is that nothing in the linked analysis suggests the people abusing Reddit mods are only making $145 a month from OF, and in fact, the analysis seems to be pretty clear that the median active creator on OF is making much more.)
As for your comment, I did not downvote you so can't explain why other's might, but I assume it's because you seemed to have misread the comment in an uncharitable way.
Highly doubt any actual creator is doing that. The payoff of untargeted spam is so low! Only makes sense if it’s outsourced at scale like any garden variety spam ring.
The usual and profitable way people promote their onlyfans on reddit is by posting pictures and videos.
I happen to agree with formerly_proven . When my OF friend described how she submitted topical stuff to subreddits in the hopes that others would follow up on her profile, I was like, "what's wrong with that? Isn't that how people are supposed to promote themselves? Giving out free, relevant stuff in the hopes you'll want to know more about them?"
I mean, isn't that how ethical self-promotion is supposed to work? Join a community, obey their norms, contribute, and if they like you, they'll follow up? How do you expect it to work?
<insert caveat about how you have no reason to believe this experience, since the sensitivity of the issue requires me to use a throwaway and hide her identity as well>
Puns not intended (seriously).
I mean, from my experience on reddit, there are all kinds of unworthy submissions from all kinds of motivations that get upvoted more than they should be and removed too slowly (or not at all) by mods. Whether it's brand promotion, or karma harvesting, or (all too often) just not understanding what submissions are appropriate for the forum, it degrades the experience.[1] But targeting OF users for autobans seems tunnel-visioned at best and slut-shaming at worst.
[1] one of my favorites, /r/LeopardsAteMyFace, is intended for examples of people a) getting hurt by b) policies and politicians they advocated for. But well over the half the submissions ignore b) and are just cases of "break law they obviously didn't like, get prosecuted".
The reason has been specified and is to the point: "... contribution is usually shallow and easy to see through. This pollutes the place with a low-effort content ..." - these OF advertisers are only interested in getting people to see their profile (as you rightly pointed out), not their posted content, because their intention is to make money from such content ... obviously, in a place where content is more higly valued, such posters will be banned to ensure that it doesn't attract more of these kind of people. And yes, many sub-reddits do have poor quality content. Thanks to the ban on OF advertisers, it is much less.
It's a figure of speech, and I'm well aware of the ostensible justification, which is why the bulk of my comment is specifically addressing it, and you even recognize it as doing so.
Do try to be charitable, if for no other reason than my profile lacking a promotional link :-p
Since you've opened the door to lectures about "didn't you read this part of the comment", then I'll have to turn it around and ask why didn't you read this part:
>>Isn't that how people are supposed to promote themselves? Giving out free, relevant stuff in the hopes you'll want to know more about them?"
>>I mean, isn't that how ethical self-promotion is supposed to work? Join a community, obey their norms, contribute, and if they like you, they'll follow up? How do you expect it to work?
What is the ethical way to self-promote? In the best world, I imagine it would look exactly like I just described. If you don't have an answer to that, a better way, then I'm not sure what basis you have for objecting here; you should probably figure it out before claiming you have a defensible position.
FWIW, "just stay in your little box and never come out" is not what I would count as a defensible position.
>contribution is usually shallow and easy to see through. This pollutes the place with a low-effort content.
It absolutely can be, sure. But the point where you say "OF promoters can never contribute anything of value" is where you cross over from "prudent moderation" into slut-shaming. My regular account links my blog, as do numerous other HNers. If that blog makes them money, should they be pre-emptively banned?
>And yes, many sub-reddits do have poor quality content. Thanks to the ban on OF advertisers, it is much less.
0% of the off-topic LAMF submissions were from OF-linked accounts, and at the same time, reddit has lost out on quality submissions from OF users, while gleefully letting through ulterior-motive submissions from people who don't bother to announce themselves. Hence, "tunnel-visioned".
What is the ethical way to self-promote?
Exactly what you propose. But if they ask you to stop even that, you should. If they don’t have enough to judge case by case with hundreds of cases, you have to understand that and agree.
By using “I” and “you” above I mean example person, not one of us.
Another thing that you assume, which is not exactly correct imo, is what slut-shaming is. We may agree that explicit directed pointing-out and shaming is bad, because it attacks a person. But we can’t blame internal “don’t want it here” feelings, even if that is based on OF link. Shaming is a direct action, not location-based attitude. The same person may not want it in a linux-related group, but may visit a link and subscribe in OF-related one. E.g. I like strippers in my local stripclub and have good relationships with few of them, but I wouldn’t want them advertise it at my nephew’s birthday party or sysop meetings.
Let's be clear here - OF creators are looking for unsolicited free advertising.
And that's at the crux of the issue - both free online communities and subscription based paid online communities are competitors because both are in the business of content generation.
Free online communities make money from advertisements. So it is in their obvious interest to discourage all attempts, by anyone, of "free" advertisement. Especially their competitor!
OF creators are in the business of making and selling their content. Obviously it is not in their best interest to make their quality content available freely. As free quality content is anathema to their business, obviously there is absolutely no reason for any community to tolerate their attempts at free self-promotion.
The solution? If you want to make money, you have to spend some money - Just pay for a suitable ad in the free online communities and support them.
The mods of these communities aren't getting the money from reddit ads, so that doesn't apply.
>The solution? If you want to make money, you have to spend some money - Just pay for a suitable ad in the free online communities and support them.
Okay, and when reddit ads are trivially blocked, and platforms won't do OF ads, what does that leave? Have you thought this through?
Note: before you say "their content sucks", yes, I agree, sucky content should be removed. But the question here is where a submission that otherwise qualifies for the sub should be removed merely on the basis that the profile of the submitter links an OF page. Again, that's even when the submission itself doesn't link it.
Sneaky, indirect, hidden advertising is worse than regular ads or 'spam'. Regardless of if a community is about gardening or guitars or cooking or basketball, most people don't want shills posting content that's secretly sponsored product placement related to their hobby or promotion of the poster for fame or profit.
Most subreddits have rules specifically against this, because otherwise the real, organic, genuine conversation and content gets drowned out by self-promoting shills trying to drive clicks to their website or views to their youtube or get free advertising/PR for their company. You're supposed to participate out of a genuine interest in the community, not to exploit them as an audience for making money.
I agree with you about the product placement stuff, and I despise the submarine shills. But that's the thing: that's rejecting the submission -- and banning the user -- on their content having failed to meet the forums standards, not simply the fact of their profile linking their OF, as the OP was referring to. That's a whole different league from "hey, here are some cool rabbits" and oh, if you look at their profile, you can find their OF page. (The OF friend in question was immediately banned for having a reddit account whose profile links OF even despite the mod accepting that it's otherwise a valid submission.)
I'm make the same challenge to you that the other respondent ignored: how should people ethically self-promote, if not that?
> Relative to effort, it looks like most accounts lose money.
I guess you could assume that. But I'm not convinced without data. If you asked me whether I expect the median OnlyFans creator to spend more or less than 10 hours a month, I'd definitely guess less. I'd expect there to be a lot of inactive or barely active accounts.
I'm curious if rent prices have gone down since I lived there, or maybe I was just getting a foreigner tax? I didn't look at kommunalkas which could definitely be done for less than $140.
The market is supersaturated now, even with the obesity epidemic there are so many college girls with perfect figures willing to bare everything for $10 a month that choosing among them is a challenge.
Top hundred worldwide is 'getting by pretty comfortably if you don't live anywhere significant, especially if you still qualify for food stamps or what have you', and it's competitive with what a career software developer will be making by 2030 or 2040 at the most.
Top thousand worldwide is already down to your $200 a month or so, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on these platforms. This is the nature of markets in an attention economy that scales worldwide: you're getting squeezed out by anybody anywhere, and if you're a niche (I'm a niche, but not alone in it: by now, there's another plugin dev who is pushing harder for money and making more than me, who is also Patreon-exclusive) then that limits the maximum size you can scale.
It's absolutely going to be the same on OnlyFans, Twitch, etc. As a job mostly this sort of thing is 'spend a bunch of money to operate at a competitive level, and then you don't earn anything to speak of'.
This IS free market dynamics in a state of maximum globalized low friction. Silicon Valley has spent a lot of time selling people on low friction interaction and discoverability. Tearing down the walls means you're competing with the girl with a perfect figure who's in New Delhi and has family money backing her (for whatever reason), and her competing with you means you work less.
When this seriously kicks in for the very software devs who've created this situation (and it may have been inevitable, let's not directly blame) and AI begins to compete with human workers at content creation and software development, the OnlyFans/Patreon/Twitch picture becomes the world, and at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability. A lot of these platforms are sustained by whales. I'd do substantially better (but would ruin my positioning) if I targeted whales.
With the following exception: I made a special effort to talk to Jack Conte at the second-to-last Patrecon, the one in California. I spoke to Jack and to Sam Yam, and tried to impress upon them the importance of consistently and reliably maintaining that 'tail' of $50, $100 a month.
I don't know if they heard me (they may have) but my argument was as follows: consider some single mother who is absolutely broke, but has a cell phone and is able to upload to YouTube or whatever. Let's say she is able to find a double-digit number of people, no better, who'll tune in as she reads bedtime stories to her kid. She is not going to become PewDiePie, but she can pull maybe $50 or $100 on Patreon, and it's relatively consistent, especially if she doesn't tie it hard to her performance and products, but keeps it low-pressure: it's very possible to create a steady and predictable income stream that way.
The Patreon guys have a stated but undefined goal to bring people to a 'life-changing' amount of income, but we are all finding that's not going to happen for 99.9% of the people attempting it. BUT, I've found from my experience that the 'life-changing' amount is around what I make: enough to build an actual business in the real world, support it, and grow. (if you're not growing in capitalism, you're gonna die). In other words, the single mom telling her kid bedtime stories on YouTube is going to fail by the terms they're predisposed to care about, 'seeding a business in LA or wherever, and getting traction to grow big'.
My argument to Jack and Sam, which I don't know if it was heard, was this: I have been homeless and seen very tough times. Being able to count upon fifty, a hundred dollars a month that is not dependent on your precarious job, keeping a roof over your head (as long as you have the phone and can upload), that is YOURS and sort of steady consistent bonus income no matter what other hell goes on in your life, is HUGE. The monetary amount is much less significant than the manner in which it is earned. It doesn't wildly vary from month to month, it's not tied to other obligations: anyone who has lived precariously knows the value of an extra fifty a month. This is at least an order of magnitude below what the Patreon guys assumed was 'life-changing', because I don't think they had the context to understand it.
So I pitched them on the importance of what they are doing, and of keeping faith with the 'tail' rather than getting too distracted by trying to create millionaires. I don't know if they heard, they may have, but that's the one time I talked seriously with 'the Patreon system'. Other than that I'm just another bozo on the bus, representing the tail end of the top 100 worldwide :)
Not at that point, though. The time to ask those questions was yesterday.
Anyway some friends are convinced deepfakes and "nudify" websites will compete with OnlyFans but I'm not convinced, at least in the short term.
As for deepfakes, it depends on how easily that can be done, and how much 'celebrity' fakeness can outcompete non-celebrity reality. From what I'm seeing in all these fields, they've got a point. If you can identify the #1 most popular celebrity for 'porn wanted of them', the desire for that could well be orders of magnitude beyond 'real person doing actual porn', and removing the identity of the source person seriously devalues them (in the process of making the deepfake porn). They cease to have market value as themselves though they have another kind as 'plausibly standing in for the celebrity while doing deepfake porn'.
There's also the problem of hyper-displays: suppose you want Kardashian porn but you can't have it. So you deepfake it. But what if you chose, since you're doing CGI anyway, to exaggerate the characteristics of your actors, or straight up CGI them, to go way beyond what the human Kardashian would even be? This really complicates the market, I think. We cannot assume that 'deepfakes' will stick to being realistic or plausible: at some point ingenuity will lead to these things being exaggerated versions of themselves.
I wouldn't dismiss your friends' concerns too quickly. In so many ways we're going to a world where unreality substantially outcompetes and crowds out reality. And it's all down to the market dynamics, and exploits within that. A truly free frictionless marketplace doesn't have ethics: those count as friction and will get selected against.
Many thousands of books are published each year but only a handful make up the majority of the sales. Same with music, blogging, YouTube, Twitter followers, incomes, athletes, etc.
We can compare to stackoverflow that probably has similar economics.
- There are 15.236M accounts on stack overflow.
- Only 4.046M accounts have more than one reputation, that's equivalent to one answer or two.
- 1.095M accounts have more than 1000 reputation. That was very easy if you started in the first few years of stack overflow, or is quite a bit of participation nowadays.
- 0.232M accounts have more than 2000 reputation.
Main take away, you can be top 26% percentile for posting a single answer or question.
It would be interesting to see the stats for users that actually try to live off it, such as a set of accounts publishing at least X hours of material per week for the last 100 weeks.
One issue though is that discoverability is very poor on OnlyFans. I suspect this is what causes "OnlyFans Spam" on places like reddit.
OnlyFans has little incentive to fix that though, as everyone spamming is basically advertising their platform externally. So, lose/lose?
I'm not sure why that is.
Edit: I’m sure people would pay more money in a model that makes them feel like they’ve got an actual personal connection with the creators, no matter the type of content. However adding sex to the mix probably boosts that effect quite a bit, if I’m allowed to speculate.
I don't think the creator or the whale intends for it to be a sugar baby/daddy type thing. Whales are lonely, and good creators know there's a lot of value from interacting with and being human to your fans.
My ex-sugar gf is an OF creator. I was with her when she started (transitioned from MyFreeCams where I met her, and brought some of her members with her). She worked her ass off to claw her way to the top 3% which is where she was when I broke things off with her. She spent way, way more time on social media, promoting herself and her brand, than she did actually making content. There are groups of creators that promote each other's social media & content on twitter and ig, and its critical to get hooked into one of those groups to succeed if you're not already a major IG or Twitter star with millions of followers.
Even at 3%, she was not making a huge amount of $$. I wish OF had more transparency around how the percentages relate to actual income..
I suppose this makes the whole headline somewhat dubious.
The numbers today are probably much higher with little change in overall proportions.
OnlyFans lets you sell your content online, just like you would on eBay or Etsy - if you want to make more money then…make more content? Or make content that people want to buy? I don’t even understand whose employees you think they should be in this scenario.
What you are suggesting is akin to Shopify, Etsy or eBay paying a minimum wage to sellers.
>>It's like saying a factory let's you assemble phones and if you want to make more money assemble more.
I literally can't see how it's even remotely comparable.
If you want to make more money on eBay, list more items on eBay. If you want to make more money on OnlyFans.....list more content on OnlyFans. Or move to a different platform, or make content that people actually want to buy.
We have been giving away our work/crap away for years now, maybe it's time to demand a bit of money from the monopoly?
I think they could afford to give back?
(And yes--I know some people are paid Youtubers.)
If i post a clip of a speech explaining how to program on youtube, and link to my paypal where you can buy the full video, shipped via mega, who should pay me as an employee? i think we can both agree nobody.
If somebody makes a website to make it easier such that you can do all 3 steps in one place, all of the sudden they should pay me as an employee?
Only fans is also the alt path if you believe employers are not paying you your real value, now you can skip them and sell directly to the public. You might make more money or you might have nothing.
When you post a message on Craigslist, do you also expect to be payed?
Arguably the "value" even the highest performing onlyfans people create is neglible.
OnlyFans is simply a marketplace of content, like Etsy for porn.
Your question is like asking: Why doesn’t the swap meet pay me hourly to show up and try to sell my junk?