In July 2024 Lily Allen confirmed she'd joined OnlyFans and found the platform "quite empowering". Photo / @lilyallen
As the “DIY porn” platform continues to generate billions, musicians including Kate Nash and Lily Allen have taken to the site to boost their income.
Last month, the singer Kate Nash announced that she had come up with a novel way to help fund her upcoming tour: selling pictures of her posterior on OnlyFans, the adults-only subscriber site. She described this as “very empowering… fun [and] funny,” and added that critics – of which there were many – can “kiss my a-- (for a price of course)”.
The premise of OnlyFans, which was founded by young Essex-born entrepreneur Tim Stokely and his father Guy in 2016, is deceptively simple.
It is a paywalled social media platform where “fans” pay a fee – anything from US$5 to US$50 per month – to view photos and videos of models, social media influencers and, more recently, pop stars.
It can only be accessed using a web browser and has no app, as a large percentage of its offering (its owners won’t be drawn on what percentage exactly) is X-rated.
OnlyFans subscribers can chat with the subjects of the videos – known as “creators” – directly and pay “tips” for personalised content. It now hosts over four million creators.
“I need extra income to take the stress out of [touring],” Nash, 37, said earlier this month. “And to pay my band and crew fairly, to put on high-quality shows for my fans. I like flashing my a-- and I know a few people that run their own adult film companies or work on OnlyFans.”
Nash is not the only musician to turn to OnlyFans. Lily Allen and the rappers Cardi B and Iggy Azalea have used the site to embark on (non-explicit) side-hustles.
Azalea promised “hotter than hell” content for the promotion of her new album, and has since closed her account.
Allen, 39, started sharing photos of her feet on the site earlier this year for an £8 monthly fee under the username @lilyallenFTSE500. She has since said that OnlyFans is already more lucrative than her music career as online streaming services pay artists a pittance of $0.003 to $0.005 per play.
In contrast, 80% of earnings on OnlyFans go directly to the creator and the site takes the remaining 20%. A spokesman says: “OnlyFans has always been a platform for creators from all genres including musicians. The global platform provides opportunities to grow their online presence, engage with fans, and generate revenue independently, away from traditional industry constraints.”
While its X-rated reputation has made some credit card companies, banks and investors skittish, the company has gone from strength to strength; it posted revenues of $1.3 billion in the year to November 2023, an increase of 20% on the previous year.
The company insists that it is more than a porn website. “We’re a site that hosts adult content, but we also host a variety of other content,” said chief executive Keily Blair in an interview with the Financial Times earlier this year. “And a lot of the people who create adult content also choose to create other content, so maybe yoga and naked yoga.”
She added that “porn” can be treated as quite a pejorative term. Part of the site’s appeal is that creators don’t need to stick to one genre. They could, indeed, film an ordinary yoga instruction video one day and a naked yoga video the next.
Blair’s predecessor Amrapali Gan, who ran the company for 18 months, told Time magazine: “There’s been a lot of misconceptions publicly about OnlyFans – who we are and who’s running this company. Honestly, most people don’t even know what the business is.”
Technically, yes, OnlyFans is home to all kinds of creators, including actors, chefs, athletes (including Team GB divers) and fitness influencers.
The rugby player James Haskell has an account, as does the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios. (Haskell posts workouts, nutrition tips and clips of him DJing, with some “nearly naked photos thrown in for good measure”; Kyrgios posts behind-the-scenes footage and interacts with fans.) But it seems its bread and butter is what Blair euphemistically calls “adult content”.
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A quick browse, for journalistic purposes only, shows that even posts that seem SFW (safe for work, meaning non-explicit) lead the user on to profiles that are most definitely NSFW (not safe for work).
One featured free post offering DIY Christmas decoration tips leads you to a profile of a lingerie-clad user offering “naughty Christmas bundles”.
Not long ago, the idea that mainstream pop artists and athletes would be posting on a site best known for DIY porn would be unthinkable.
How did OnlyFans become one of the biggest success stories in the British tech industry?
Tim Stokely, its founder, had several business ventures under his belt before OnlyFans took off, including a porn website called Customs4U. Curiously, it was a family affair from the off, funded with a £10,000 loan from his father, Guy, and run partly by his elder brother, Thomas.
A 75% stake in its parent company was sold to Ukrainian-American porn magnate Leonid Radvinsky in 2018. It has made him a billionaire.
“When OnlyFans launched it was the first platform of its type and it was deliberately set up to host all types of content creators,” Stokely said in a rare interview with GQ magazine in 2021.
“You could see the explosion of influencer marketing, but the influencers were getting paid via ad campaigns and product endorsements. Our thinking was always, ‘OK, what if you could build a platform where it’s exactly [the same] or very similar to existing on social media, but with the key difference being the payment button?’”
The other key difference was an (almost) “anything goes” policy when it came to content, which made it popular with sex workers and adult performers from the start. But it was the pandemic that really made its fortune.
Strip clubs were closed and the country was locked down, so sex workers and performers turned to the site as a means of making money.
High-profile figures such as the actor Bella Thorne and the rapper Cardi B further increased its notoriety.
Both joined for a short period and posted suggestive but non-explicit content. Thorne made a reported $1 million the day she signed up.
READ MORE: Bella Thorne’s wild year on OnlyFans and backlash from sex workers
As its profile rose, OnlyFans also began to convert those who had never considered sex work but needed the money. It became relatively commonplace among university students, for example, leading Durham University to the controversial decision to offer online sex work safety training for its students in 2021.
One performer, a 30-year-old estate agent turned OnlyFans creator and escort, says that one big upside is that OnlyFans subscribers are kinder than anonymous trolls on other social media. “Everyone who subscribes to you obviously likes you so they’re all very supportive, kind, and nice to you,” she says.
But it is near impossible to build success on OnlyFans without having a profile elsewhere and promoting it on other social media. “You have to have a thick skin because you’re promoting yourself as a commodity in some ways, something to be bought.”
She spends about two hours per week filming, but it is chatting to subscribers directly and taking “tips” for personalised content that makes the most money. This can quickly turn into a fulltime job. “I spend about two hours each day chatting to fans. I also spend my free time editing content and have someone who schedules videos for me, because that’s quite laborious.”
What do friends and family make of her career change? “I don’t think my extended family knows, but my direct relatives do and they’ve never said anything negative,” she says. “My friends all know and are very supportive of what I do… I was used to a certain lifestyle and wanted to continue living that lifestyle.”
She won’t say exactly how much she makes, but for some creators, the platform has been incredibly lucrative indeed – it has paid out over $15 billion to its performers since it launched. Dannii Harwood, one of the first performers to post content on the site, made her first million off it within a year.
Allen and Nash have not specified how much they have earned from pivoting to OnlyFans. But if it has been lucrative for creators, it has been infinitely more lucrative for its owners. The company paid a US$472m ($838m) dividend to Radvinsky this year alone, and Stokely is now worth an estimated $3.8b. They know, as we all do, that sex sells.
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