Sex work is mostly about in-person, one-on-one, personal encounters. Pornography is mostly about publishing, whether in print or other media, so it is mostly about trying to reach a wider audience (even if a specialized one). The internet has given birth to something in between, as exemplified by OnlyFans, a site that allows online communication of a sexual sort to be personalized, via individual subscriptions to personalized content, or micro-subscriptions to particular, paywall protected content. (The motto on their front page reads "Sign up to make money and interact with your fans!") It grew a lot during the pandemic.
The NY Times has a story that likens it to a strip show with private rooms, in which the show on center stage is an invitation for fans and performers to interact more privately. Star performers can make real money, although most performers aren't stars.
OnlyFans Isn’t Just Porn By Charlotte Shane
"OnlyFans was founded in 2016, though its bland design makes it look like a relic from an older era. Its interface isn’t attractive, but it is familiar and easy to navigate, like a pared-down, browser-based version of Instagram or Twitter. (An OnlyFans smartphone app does not currently exist; it wouldn’t be allowed on the App Store or Google Play because of its X-rated content.) In December 2019, the platform had a user base of 17 million, which means that at some point during the pandemic, it started averaging as many new registrations per month as it had in a previous year.
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"Though OnlyFans’ representatives seem to distance the site from its sexual content, the platform is synonymous with porn. Its naughty cachet attracts celebrities, whose presence on the site garners a disproportionate amount of attention. When Cardi B joined last August, she made headlines. (“No, I’m not going to be showing my titties,” she warned, but she did promise behind-the-scenes content from her risqué “WAP” music video with Megan Thee Stallion.) Celebrities use the site because they know that regardless of a creator’s stated career (chef, fitness trainer and influencer are popular), OnlyFans’ draw is the promise of seeing that which is normally unseen.
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"In this virtual strip club, as in the brick-and-mortar club, there are wide discrepancies in pay. Some performers leave with $100, while other hustlers go home with ten times as much. Established porn stars who before the pandemic could rake in thousands per night by appearing as a strip joint’s “featured dancer” enjoy a similar, even more lucrative power on OnlyFans.
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"“OnlyFans is buying houses for girls,” she told me. “It is supporting sex workers’ families. It’s everything that people are saying.” But like the misleading caption used to sell a celebrity’s locked posts, what people say can be accurate while failing to tell the truth.
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"OnlyFans was perfectly positioned to become a housebound population’s go-to source for explicit material because of what is called the gentrification of the internet. In the context of sex work, this refers to an aggressive pattern of policing both the sex trade and the people who work in it.
"In the United States, this regulatory campaign can be traced back to the federal government’s protracted and ultimately successful crusade against Craigslist’s Erotic Services in the early 2010s. Since then, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors have systematically targeted a slew of sites that cater to sex workers, particularly advertising platforms like Backpage, which shuttered in 2018 after a multiyear effort by California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris. In April that year, the bills known collectively as FOSTA-SESTA, which further criminalize communication around commercial sex, were signed into law by Donald Trump.
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