DJ Khaled and Fat Joe join OnlyFans. What does this mean for other creators?

By Malavika Pradeep

Published Jan 26, 2021 at 12:00 PM

Reading time: 2 minutes

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Image by Christopher Ott from Unsplash

Last week we had Bernie Sanders on a chair, this one we have DJ Khaled on OnlyFans. Though #PutBernieAnywhere was just free entertainment making its rounds on the internet, DJ Khaled’s newest ‘venture’ with Fat Joe is not.

Taking Instagram by storm, DJ Khaled announced the launch of his joint OnlyFans page with Fat Joe, gently urging his fans to subscribe and tune in for exclusive access to their OnlyFans content starting 25 January 2021. Along with this gentle reminder, phrased as “IF I WERE YOU PUT YOUR MONEY ON ME,” he stated that the account solely exists to “motivate, inspire and spread positive vibes,” or “the light” as he terms it.

 

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A post shared by DJ KHALED (@djkhaled)

DJ Khaled and Fat Joe’s joint OnlyFans aims to be a fresh breath of air among all the doomscrolling and will feature insights into their personal lives. The content is scheduled to start with a basketball face-off series called ‘The Rematch’, followed by them dining and hanging out in their studio with other guests.

“We’ll be sharing content that’s not anywhere else….it’s the light,” Khaled said in a statement, reported by Complex. “We also wanted to create a community that’s full of positivity and hype each other up! We want to get to know our actual fans,” Fat Joe added.

Subscription to “the light” will supposedly shed you $20 a month and it seems like DJ Khaled and Fat Joe are not the first A-listers to branch out into the uncensored social media platform. Chris Brown and Lil Pump are some of the celebrity pioneers on the platform followed by Cardi B who redefined the purpose of OnlyFans by using it as a promotional tool for her legendary ‘WAP’ single. Many other celebrities have revealed their plans to join including Michael B Jordan, who is set to dedicate the page to his quarantine moustache: “Murphy.”

OnlyFans has become a popular hub for adult entertainers over the lockdown. They share exclusive content including pictures and performances in exchange for a subscription fee. In an era synonymous with rampant unemployment, it was no surprise to witness the migration of many onto the platform in search of primary sources of income.

Over time, however, the platform has also been deployed as a promotional tool where celebrities push out new projects and ventures. These influencers successfully redirect their followers across platforms to engage with their content on OnlyFans. This essentially means a loss in demand for other non-celebrity content creators on the platform. It makes their work more challenging, time-consuming and less financially rewarding, eventually discouraging them off the platform.

Apart from societal criticisms, The New York Times reports the involvement of personal risks like ‘doxxing’—a form of online harassment where users dig up and publish private information with malicious intent, and ‘capping’—sharing of unauthorised screenshots or recordings on the internet. All of this adds to their fear of not being able to pay their bills for tomorrow or land a traditional 9 to 5 job in the future.

The fact that Tim Stokely, CEO of OnlyFans, admits to being eager to “take OnlyFans out of the pornography niche and make it a platform for all sorts of influencers and audiences” does not help their case either.

One can either have a field day counting the number of fire emojis on DJ Khaled’s Instagram announcement or counting the number of ‘wait, what?’s on his Twitter thread. There is simply no in-between. While the majority lean towards questioning their own existence along with DJ Khaled’s on OnlyFans, some can’t wait to spend $20 to see the producer and rapper shoot hoops on the platform.

With celebrities increasingly conquering OnlyFans, we can only hope there won’t be “another one” (after “Murphy”, of course).