children on Onlyfans
reality of being on Onlyfans
And this argument, from Reddit, that suggests OF is a multi-level-marketing scam:
Recruitment
OnlyFans ultimately runs on a recruitment system; currently, the referrer gets 5% of the recruitee’s first year earnings, but before this year, it was 10% of their lifetime earnings.
Pressure to provide novelty
Like with all sex work, OnlyFans targets women as service-providers and men are the customer base. These men desensitised by porn demand novelty and greater taboos to be able to get excited. In porn, this creates a short lifetime cycle where an actress starts by marketing herself as fresh meat, then by each more subsequently degrading act, until they are considered used up and out of the market. Due to the pace and scope of online porn, this now happens in months to a year. The actress then has two choices: try and get out of the industry while facing huge, lifetime consequences, or continue to try and provide novelty through recruitment of others. Even historically, this is why there was a prostitute-to-pimp pathway.
Female Empowerment
Like with MLMs, the OnlyFans users who are turning to recruitment will turn to their social networks. OnlyFans doesn’t provide an actual contacts or clout with the sex work industry, so they have no other options. However, with trying to manipulate women you already know into sex work - it means you know their vulnerabilities, and many women approached about joining OnlyFans have talked about being bombarded (love-bombing) with flattery and stories of how it improved the users’ self-worth, esteem and circumstances, and will do the same for them. Many also talk about being made to feel they were ‘denying’ people something (their bodies) that deserved to be shared because they were ‘too hot’ to keep it to themselves.
Rag-to-riches advertising
Similar to being a ‘sugar-baby’ participants in OnlyFans often talk about their earnings as if they were purely able to spend it on luxuries - designer handbags, make-up, waxing - without mentioning that sex work is culturally stigmatised and makes it harder for you to work outside the porn industry; and that these things are often necessary to perform the standards required of you by your customer base, up to and including plastic surgery. Often they will talk about this as ‘business expenses’ flippantly, as if that doesn’t contradict their talking points about sex work being an easy way to get money to do whatever you want with.
More conventional MLMs usually target women such as military wives and mothers, who have households to look after but are unable to develop careers to do so as they have to move around with their spouse, and are anxious to contribute through other means. Instead, OnlyFans and other forms of sex work target young women - in particular, those who are in college or university and are facing steep university fees in their future. OnlyFans targets the economically desperate and insecure just as much as conventional MLMs do.
You have control over your own hours / work
Recruitment also becomes necessary to continue making money, not just because of the demand for novelty and the impact on your options outside sex work; but because you will not be able to produce a certain amount of content and then perpetually earn off of it. This is because the male userbase takes pride in purchasing your nudes / videos etc and then sharing them for free with others, including setting up local region-based facebook groups to ‘trade’ nudes etc of women known to them. Soon after producing your content it will have been ripped and copied to many porn hosting sites and shared freely so that it will earn you little or no money beyond that first push, forcing you to participate in the novelty pipeline to continue earning.
Less than 1% make money; most lose money
So, ultimately a more reliable way to earn money through OnlyFans and other forms of sex work is to recruit as the opportunity of selling yourself is exhausted very quickly. The novelty pipeline, and aggressive demands and entitlement of the userbase, are likely to lead to actions you would have never signed up to perform and cause mental and emotional damage to you and those you recruit. Just like an MLM, the only way to really make money is to be one of the first ones on board so that you have the largest possible pool of women to recruit from; OnlyFans, and most other forms of sex work, are well past this stage and have already glutted the market, meaning that few can now expect to profit in any meaningful way from it.
And that's all a million miles away from what they call "full service sex work" but it sounds pretty grim to me.