We all love influencers, even though we also love to hate them half the time. And our obsession with getting a glimpse into their every day lives is oftentimes unquenchable. Which is why it makes complete sense—at least to me—that OnlyFans is currently booming and taking the world with it.

OnlyFans is a social media platform where influencers are free to post whatever content they decide to—from suggestive pictures to X-rated videos. In exchange for these, their fans pay them money in order to access their content. What started out as a small adult platform has now become one of the most important websites out there.

Just to make things clear, OnlyFans is not only for people who work in the porn industry. The social media is also a great website for fitness bloggers or dieticians to sell their advice. In other words, anyone can sign up to OnlyFans, and all content is accepted, whether it is clean or filthy.

From tutorials and tips to behind-the-scenes videos and selfies, a lot of fanatic followers would be willing to pay for them, and that’s exactly how you could become an OnlyFans influencer.

Some creators simply use OnlyFans to share sexy pictures for extra money while professional sex workers use it to generate more income. You can use OnlyFans as a subscriber or as an earner—to earn, just add your bank details to the app and start uploading content.

Starting from $4.99 per month, the maximum you can charge your fans for subscriptions is $49.99. You could request a monthly fee of $20 thousand if you really wanted but you would risk not having any subscribers. The minimum amount your fans can tip you is $5.

Whenever you sell any subscription to a viewer, OnlyFans gives you 80 per cent of the payment received. OnlyFans says that the 20 per cent fee they charge is to cover the payment processing, hosting and “all other associated costs with running the OnlyFans website and apps,” which seems fair.

The payment processing system is inbuilt in the app, which eliminates external or third party billing and payment portals.

Payments are made every 30 days until you unsubscribe from the specific profile. You can unsubscribe from profiles you no longer want to follow at any time and stop paying for them.

Although we recently spoke to an up-and-coming adult actor who shared how stressful the porn industry is and how OnlyFans helps, there are many famous influencers who ‘made it’ on the platform.

Monica Huldt, known as miss_swedish_bella on OnlyFans, is one of the top earners of the site. The adult content creator makes her living providing X-rated pictures and videos to hundreds of followers. She told Business Insider that she is earning more than $100,000 a year selling explicit content on OnlyFans.

She earns this amount from a mixture of subscribers who pay $6.50 a month as well as larger fees for pay-per-view and commissioned work. Huldt starts the day with a ‘good morning’ picture and answering messages and finishes it by checking in again with fans. Everything in between is work, from going to the gym for her daily workout to producing content based on specific paid requests.

Other celebrities such as singer Kerry Katona and model Blac Chyna have also joined the phenomenon. Former beauty queen Danielle Lloyd has also been using the X-rated website. Lloyd charges her subscribers $25 per month and she offers fans a chance to purchase topless snaps of herself for $140.33.

Her bio reads: “Former Miss England, Miss GB and American Playboy centrefold. Love working out, keeping my body in shape, recently had a Brazilian Bum. All pictures watermarks and copyright of Danielle Lloyd if used you sued.”

OnlyFans has become so popular in the last year that even Beyoncé name-checked the site in her remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Savage’, prompting a 15 per cent uptick in traffic to the site. Unfortunately for her fans out there, queen B does not have an account on OnlyFans.

While it would be naive to think OnlyFans could replace Instagram altogether, it certainly is gaining more and more popularity. The platform offers influencers a chance of making money without having to promote any brand or product, leaving them in charge of their own earnings.

Whether you’re already an OnlyFans addict or you just don’t see the point in paying content makers, one thing is for sure: most people are obsessed with the uncensored social media platform. 

Over the past three years, a silent yet growing revolution has rattled the porn industry with the advent of OnlyFans—a website and app offering a monthly subscription service to self-made adult content in a way that mimics the culture and interface of social media. Praised for putting the power in the hands of content creators, as opposed to studios, and granting viewers a more intimate look into the lives of performers, OnlyFans seems to be on a trajectory to change the landscape of the porn industry forever.

The platform was launched in 2016 by British tech entrepreneur Timothy Stokely. After founding Customs4U, a fetish website where users could order customised adult content, Stokely went on to create OnlyFans. While the website is not a porn platform per se, as it was officially created in order to grant viewers a look into the behind-the-scenes of influencers’ lives, it has nonetheless been used primarily for sharing of and monetising on adult content.

The layout of OnlyFans resembles a typical social media feed, only the content uploaded on it typically reveals more than a bikini shot or six-pack abs. Performers upload content regularly (some on a daily or semi-daily basis) for a monthly subscription fee that normally ranges from $10 to $20. At the request of fans, some performers choose to create special content tailored specifically to the user’s request, which is sent directly to their inbox for an additional payment. Currently, the platform has over 12 million registered users and over 70,000 content creators who, combined, generate an average of over $150 million a year. Some of the most successful performers on the platform have reportedly raked in tens of thousands of dollars a month.

As many adult film actors (also called pornstars) are underpaid by studios and offered less-than-desirable working conditions, a considerable number of them have been migrating to OnlyFans, where they get to keep 80 per cent of their profits, have control over their schedule and content, and be their own boss.

It isn’t only established adult film actors who flock en masse to OnlyFans, however, but also influencers and bloggers who had never before entertained the notion of joining the porn industry. As a matter of fact, that was the primary goal of Stokely when he established the platform—enabling influencers to monetise directly on their content, without the intervention of a third partner or having to win the graces of a brand, all the while satiating the public’s thirst for a more ‘intimate’ gaze into the lives of social media personas.

Screen Shot spoke to Ty London XXX, a fairly recent recruit to OnlyFans who has been thriving on the platform. “With OnlyFans you are able to provide your own content, you can do it at your own pace, you can control it,” Ty said, “it also opened a door for me to collaborate with a production studio, which I’m excited to do.”

Ty referred to a certain freedom that OnlyFans encourages by giving a platform to people of all body types, gender expressions and backgrounds, thus shattering some of the conventions perpetuated by the porn industry. “Social media at the moment is becoming a lot more queer, and you see a lot of people [being] very comfortable with their bodies. And I thought, well, why not bring my queer self into it and be fun and keep pushing boundaries within porn.”

The rapid growth of OnlyFans has sent shivers down the spines of porn studios, who are declining in popularity and were already facing a massive loss in revenue since the emergence of websites like Xvideos that offer free streaming of porn. But even such streaming services appear to be threatened by OnlyFans’ unique appeal, and many of them have reached out to OnlyFans performers, asking them to make exclusive content for their websites.

But the platform still poses considerable challenges to performers. Just like on any other social media platforms, it’s hard to keep people engaged—especially when it comes to sexual interest and particularly when a fee is involved. “Just from doing it for the last few months, mental health is something that popped up for me because I’ve had a few dips where I’ve been like—there’s such a demand to post and you’ve got a lot of people to please, money to make, and you need to keep the same amount of fans on your page for the next month and the month after that. It becomes quite stressful at times. You’re like ‘I’ve run out of things to post and people will get bored and I’ll be losing fans’,” said Ty. “Also, there are lots of times when you’re not feeling sexual and force yourself to do it. It’s really difficult. It’s tricky,” he added.

Yet Ty believes there is a way to deal with the stress that comes with the job, partly due to features offered by the platform. “Take a day off, away from the phone. On OnlyFans you can write things, you can do polls. There’s a lot of changes that they’ve been introducing so there are ways of not having to post.”

It makes perfect sense that more and more people turn to OnlyFans as their source of sexual pleasure. Many view it as the next phase in the evolution of influencer culture. From a porn perspective, people aren’t interested in manicured actors performing trite and badly acted scenes. We long for closeness. Intimacy. We want to feel a connection with the objects of our fantasy and admiration. And with influencers morphing into friends and OnlyFans performers offering a peek into their bedrooms—this becomes more of a possibility. Through a screen, that is. And for a monthly fee.