n 2020, an at-the-time little-known social community known as OnlyFans began gaining an entire lot of traction. Namechecked by Beyoncé in her verse on Megan Thee Stallion’s musicSavage, the OnlyFans website and app all of a sudden noticed a 15% enhance in hits – visitors that was already rising due to the Covid-19 compelled stay-at-home orders.
Within the intervening years, OnlyFans has grown to supply content material for over 200 million subscribers, changing into synonymous with porn and grownup content material in well-liked tradition. However is that repute honest?
What’s OnlyFans?
The concept behind OnlyFans is to permit content material creators the liberty to publish on to followers in return for one-off funds or a subscription.
Those that join the positioning purely to eat content material can observe as many creators as their price range permits, letting them see solely the paywalled members’ content material each time they sign up to the web site or app.
Not like Instagram or TikTok, OnlyFans permits creators to straight monetise their content material, with the positioning taking 20% of all earnings.
Is OnlyFans only for grownup content material and porn?
Whereas OnlyFans has grow to be synonymous with grownup content material over time, it’s truly supposed for anybody with a fanbase who desires to monetise their writing, footage and movies.
Certainly, when you visited the OnlyFans homepage understanding nothing about it, you’d discover no reference to grownup content material inside in any respect. On the time of writing, the homepage highlights the work of a private coach, a gardener and a automobile fanatic.
However that’s deeply deceptive. Whereas there’s no official determine on it, estimates throughout the net state that the positioning is anyplace between 70% and 98% grownup content material in some kind or different.
In different phrases, when you’re a musician or comic who desires to promote on to your followers, they might anticipate much more when you promote having an OnlyFans account – even when it’s not strictly a requirement for membership.
Didn’t OnlyFans attempt to ban grownup content material?
Sure, however just for 5 days earlier than it reversed the choice following a revolt from content material makers and subscribers alike.
The transfer apparently got here as a result of banks have been refusing to work with the platform, however the firm tweeted it had now “secured assurances essential to help our numerous creator group” and would not must go forward with the plan.
What celebrities use OnlyFans?
As tales of top-performing OnlyFans customers making tens of hundreds of kilos every month make headlines, some celebrities have sought to money in with their very own accounts on the positioning.
Usually talking, celebrities on OnlyFans made their manner from actuality TV, with ex-Love Islanders Megan Barton-Hanson, Adam Collard, Arabella Chi and Katie Salmon all buying a following on the positioning.
Former Love Island contestant Megan Barton-Hanson has an OnlyFans account
/ Ian West /PA WireLauren Goodger of Towie fame, X Issue contestant Chloe Khan and former Miss England Danielle Lloyd are additionally on the positioning, as is former Atomic Kitten Kerry Katona, who claimed to have remodeled £1m from the positioning in an interview with the Mirror.
The choice of celebrities to embrace OnlyFans isn’t essentially with out consequence. In 2021, Hollyoaks actress Sarah Jayne Dunn needed to depart the cleaning soap after refusing to desert her £11-per-month OnlyFans account.
Is OnlyFans secure?
Solely folks over the age of 18 are allowed to enroll to OnlyFans and the web site asks for proof through government-issued ID earlier than it’ll enable folks to make use of the positioning.
That stated, this hasn’t proved foolproof previously, with a BBC investigation discovering examples of under-18s in a position to arrange accounts and promote express content material through faux identification.
For subscribers, the corporate makes use of a third-party cost supplier, so the platform’s creators don’t see folks’s bank card particulars and the corporate doesn’t retailer cost data.
Clearly given a variety of the content material on the web site, it’s as much as you the way secure you think about the precise content material to be.
In 2020, greater than 1.6TB of movies and pictures from OnlyFans have been leaked on-line. The corporate stated this wasn’t a hack, however the leaked information appeared to have been “curated from a number of sources, together with different social media purposes”.
What are the highest options to OnlyFans?
With OnlyFans’ success, there’s now no scarcity of web sites for grownup content material creators trying to promote on to their followers, together with Fansly, Manyvids and FanCentero.
For content material creators trying to keep away from the idea that their work should be of an grownup nature, Patreon or Ko-fi are higher bets. They particularly rule out grownup content material of their phrases of service.
