Subscription site OnlyFans has 220 million users worldwide, a large portion of which are watching and making porn. Alex Casey speaks to local creators about the growth of the platform in Aotearoa, and the highs and lows of working on it.
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Niamh has OnlyFans to thank for her new leaf blower. When one of her subscribers offered top dollar to watch her pop enormous balloons with her arse, the 23 year-old Aucklander quickly found that a leaf blower was the only inflation method that worked. But that wasn’t her only hurdle in producing this piece of custom content. “The popping itself was really frightening,” she laughs. “I went to jump down on the balloon to pop it, but obviously it was so strong that it bounced me right off and I fell off the bed and hit my bedside table. Hilarious.”
She sent the blooper video, alongside a successful take, to her grateful subscriber. He loved it. So much so, in fact, that he has commissioned her again. Her task this time? To pop a whopping total of 400 balloons of various shapes and sizes, all of which have now turned up in her PO Box from the other side of the world. “Everyone’s got such different kinks, fantasies and fetishes that they want to try out,” says Niamh. “It’s cool to see what everyone is into.”
Niamh is one of two million creators on OnlyFans, an online platform that allows audiences to pay for exclusive content from a wide range of makers. These include musicians, artists, athletes, artists, influencers and, most notoriously, adult entertainers. First launching in the UK in 2016, the platform exploded from a subscriber base of 7.5 million to 85 million in 2020, thanks to a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and a single Beyonce lyric. As of August 2022, OnlyFans has 220 million users and has paid out over $8 billion to creators.
Although OnlyFans was unable to provide a data breakdown by country, Niamh says there is a thriving community of creators here in Aotearoa. “There’s quite a lot more of us than you think,” she says. “When I started, it was really hard to find other people that did it here, but it has grown so much.” She had been working in insurance and dabbling in the online adult space – “selling underwear and things like that” – when she started her OnlyFans account in November 2020. More customers had been asking for lingerie photos, and it seemed an easy money-maker.
“I wasn’t really known as the type of super sexual person that would be doing this,” she says. “But I was like ‘fuck it, I’m gonna give it a try’.” In her first month she made $5, then $50, then $860, a gradual climb which Niamh is quick to point out is much more realistic than most of the sensational headlines about creators in the media. “For most people it is not like you blow up overnight and you make $50,000 or anything like that.” Until very recently she kept her “normal” day job at an insurance company, but is now making a living from her OnlyFans.
At first glance, Jasminx could be one of those OnlyFans overnight Cinderella stories. The Aucklander was feeling unfulfilled in her first year at beauty school when the pandemic hit. “I thought being a beautician was my life trajectory, then Covid happened and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” Stuck at home, she was interested to see more and more people she followed on Instagram posting about their OnlyFans accounts, and started one herself. “I thought it would be a fun thing to do on the side,” she says. “I just wanted to make some extra cash. I never expected it to be a big thing.”
Although she derides her early work – “so clueless, just posting the most low quality photos” – Jasminx says she loved the creativity involved in planning the photography, the costumes and the lighting. The money didn’t hurt either. “I made a few grand in the first month and that was a lot of money for me back then.” She posted her account on Reddit and devoted more time to the likes of Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, all of which she would use to steer followers to subscribe to her OnlyFans. Safe to say, she never went back to beauty school.
As of writing, Jasminx has a combined social media following of around 650,000 that would be closer to 2.3 million if she hadn’t recently had her TikTok (1.7 million followers) banned. “I hate how social media companies pretend like sex workers and adult performers are bad and don’t deserve a platform, while everyone else is out there promoting all their services and their businesses,” she says. “It makes our jobs very hard. OnlyFans does not promote you at all if you’re doing adult content, so you really need those other avenues.”
Niamh agrees that navigating social media is one of the hardest parts of the job. “If your videos on TikTok aren’t reaching as wide of an audience, that’s when you suddenly think ‘oh shit, what am I doing wrong?’ You definitely get in your own head about it.” She too has suffered bans, including from TikTok where she had a 30,000-strong following. “I was devastated because it really does affect business,” she says. “That audience is gone in an instant. You’re not going to be able to find them again and they’re probably not going to be able to find you.”
Damian began posting his own adult content on Tumblr over a decade ago, just before the infamous porn ban on the platform. “Tumblr was a real mixed bag back then. It was like, beautiful photography of architecture, fan drawings of different characters, plates of food and then just like… porn.” He thought he would “have a crack” at posting photos of himself, and enjoyed connecting with other people doing the same. It was when the Tumblr porn ban caused “the great migration” to Twitter that he decided to monetise what had been a hobby.
“I started to look around at a few different websites, but settled into OnlyFans mostly because it was easy to use. I’m a little bit of a technophobe, ironically.” He began posting short form videos and “racy” photos early in 2020, and saw his following double when the pandemic hit. Still, he considers himself a small creator in a big pond. “I’m not making a living off it, but it is nice to have some pocket money.” He has a full-time job, and says he doesn’t have time for high production values. “I know people who edit like Weta Workshop when they are cutting their OnlyFans stuff,” he laughs. “I’m like ‘yeah, lighting’s fine, let’s post it’.”
One of the positives of OnlyFans is that it provides a more realistic representation of people’s bodies, says Damian. “When I was growing up, gay porn was all these muscled-up, tanned gods and it gave me an unhealthy view of my own body,” he says. “Now, with anyone doing it, it’s like ‘oh, cool. I can look like this, I’m not abnormal.’” Niamh has struggled with her own body image in the past, and says OnlyFans has given her a new sense of confidence. “Especially with all the angles I see now,” she laughs.
As for the nature of the content they are making, Damian says he will post anything within OnlyFans’ guidelines, describing it as the “missionary sex” of adult platforms. “It’s interesting because you can post pornographic content, but not the hardcore fetish-y stuff,” he says. “It feels like a parent giving out very confusing messages: you can put porn on here, but not that porn.” Niamh receives a lot of requests for what she delicately describes as “going to the bathroom” content, also a violation of OnlyFans rules.
Jasminx says there is a perception her custom content must be “crazy stuff”, when her biggest request is to simply say someone’s name. “People just love that personal touch and they really want to feel closer to you as a creator,” she says. “There’s an assumption that people are just on OnlyFans because they are horny, which can be true, but there really are a lot of people out there who just like having someone to talk to.” She receives roughly 200 messages a day from her subscribers who tell her “all sorts of things” about their lives, their jobs, their relationships.
“People who use OnlyFans are just normal people like everyone else,” she says. “They need emotional intimacy, they need sexual intimacy, it’s just human nature.”
For a platform built on intimacy and trust, OnlyFans created a deep schism within the creator community last year. In August 2021, the platform announced that it would be banning all adult material to focus on more “mainstream” content. The backlash was immediate around the world, including here in Aotearoa. “Everyone went haywire,” Jasminx remembers, “it was so disappointing because sex workers made OnlyFans rich, we put them on the map, and then they completely betrayed us and said they would take away our source of income.”
OnlyFans retracted the decision just a week later, but Jasminx says the damage had already been done. “That was probably the biggest downfall of the site,” she says. “Now we just can’t trust them.” Many creators have set up accounts on competing platforms in the event that OnlyFans changes their mind again. “I know a lot of people who rely on it for their livelihood,” says Damian, “I can only imagine how terrifying it would have been to not know whether you were going to have an income or not.”
Leaks are another ongoing stress for creators. Although OnlyFans boasts a strict copyright policy page, policing screenshots and the sharing of content in private groups is much more difficult in reality. One day Niamh woke up to a message on her personal Instagram from someone she knew, who said that her adult content had been shared in a Facebook Messenger group, alongside her full name. “My stomach dropped,” she says. “But at the same time, I was like OK, what can I actually do to sort this out?’’
Unfortunately, taking action in private group chats is nearly impossible, but Niamh did sign up for Rulta as a result of the leak. The DMCA-approved agency scans the internet using your username and details and sends takedown notices (and eventually fines) to anyone who shares your content. It costs Niamh around $200 a month. “It’s pretty expensive to be paying that much to protect yourself, and even then it’s not getting everything,” she says.
Jasminx says the lack of protection on OnlyFans speaks to a wider problem. “These platforms don’t even want to admit that they have adult content, let alone keep us safe.” The responsibility to stop leaks shouldn’t just fall on OnlyFans alone, she says, but the users. “When people started leaking my stuff, it really felt like I was being violated,” she says. “But now I’ve realised it’s not actually my problem – the problem is with our society, the patriarchy, and the fact that people think they are entitled to this stuff.”
It appears a big part of the problem with being an OnlyFans creator is the fact that people are often working in isolation, having to navigate things like content leaks, aggressive subscribers and social media bans alone. “It’s a really scary thing to do, because you are taking a big risk and there’s still so much stigma associated with it,” says Jasminx. “I hate how people think it’s like a last resort or like a no talent thing. You need to be good at so much stuff: managing yourself and your mental health, managing your time, photography, lighting, everything.”
All of this has led to the creation of Thumper, her own adult talent management agency and production company that is launching later in the month. “We literally don’t have a female-owned, safe, sex-positive community in this country,” she says. “Thumper provides a support system for people to come to so they don’t feel like they’re alone.” Echoing the likes of Erika Lust internationally, her goal is to steer away from the male gaze and the idea that adult content is a “dirty, tacky, scary thing.”
“We have script writers, set designers, intimacy coordinators and creative directors,” she says. “We are ready to produce the very best quality adult content in New Zealand.”
Jasminx hopes Thumper will be one step closer to lifting the stigma around adult content in Aotearoa. “People just assume that because we are naked, it takes away the work,” she says. “People also think that we have no self worth, when actually you need so much self-worth to deal with the fucking backlash.” Niamh also wants people to reconsider how they view the “stupid girl doing nothing on OnlyFans” stereotype. “We work hard like anyone else,” she says. “It is just that we use our bodies in a different way.”
As for Damian, he just wants people working in the adult industry to be acknowledged as multi-faceted humans like everyone else. “Just because we’re doing this, it is not all that we are,” he says. “For example, I also like pottery and reading books.”
