zlacker

There are a few key points to understanding the OnlyFans business which are not covered by either article (and the one on xsrus.com is pretty old and is off by several billions regarding revenue now).

* Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric.

* Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion.

* Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie.

* Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption.

I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company.

Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.

>>safety+(OP)
> In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced

It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t

>>willia+98
for now, but chat will be llm-fied before the content is created by an ai, that's for sure.

>>safety+(OP)
> Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships [...] Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model,

Is there any hard evidence this is true beyond a tiny deluded fraction of the userbase?

Aren't 99% of users just straightforwardly transactional, trading money for access to photos and videos, just like subscribing to a newspaper?