Under the eye-catching headline “How OnlyFans Changed Sex Work Forever,” The New York Times on Saturday delved into the sex-friendly social media site OnlyFans.com, which, according to the Times, has accomplished the feat described in the headline.
According to the Times story, the site “has put X-rated entertainment in the hands of its entertainers. Call it the paywall of porn.”
Now, those in the adult industry know that OnlyFans is far from the only platform out there to put power into the hands of performers. The list is long, from clip sites to cam sites, as well as mainstream social media platforms and newly emerging all-adult alternatives.
But the Times report is interesting in that it delves into details about OnlyFans. By offering performers an 80-20 split on subscription revenues, OnlyFans has allowed performers to pull in $10,000 in a single month. Or in the case of the Australian “fitness model” who the Times says is “the most popular OnlyFans personality,” 10 times that amount.
According to the article, Jem Wolfie of Perth, Australia, collects $10 monthly fees from 10,000 subscribers, who pay to watch as she “shows off her Kardashianesque proportions, squatting in really tight leggings and squeezing her breasts together, strategically covering her nipples.”
The fact that Wolfie does not show herself engaged in sex acts, or even nudity, represents the “paradox” in the success of OnlyFans, according to the Times.
“The hottest site in the adult entertainment industry is dominated by providers who show fewer sex acts and charge increasing fees depending on how creative the requests get,” the article by Times reporter Jacob Bernstein says. “Models who join the site often presume that their subscribers will increase in number if they post more often and make the content more explicit. The ‘more often’ part is true. The ‘more explicit’ part is not.”
But of course nudity is not off-limits. One of the site’s original models, Dannii Harwood, has been known to feature videos in which she would “order a pizza to her home, whereupon she would answer the door naked.” And while that might not sound extreme by the standards of the porn industry, Harwood showed the Times digital pay stubs showing that she earned more than $50,000 in November alone.
But more interesting is Bernstein’s reporting on the site’s owner, Tim Stokely, “an earnest technocrat who looks like Mark Zuckerberg by way of Savile Row,” who previously owned a “soft core” site called Glam Girls, where Harwood was also a model. Stokely also was involved in Customs4U, a clip-based platform that exhibited at the 2014 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.
In written answers to questions from Bernstein, Stokely said that he worked at the OnlyFans parent company with his father, Guy Stokely, a former investment banker at Barclays Bank.
On a somewhat related note, in what would appear to be something more than a case of coincidence, the episode of Saturday Night Live that aired the very same evening after the NYT ran this piece included a hilarious skit in which a family out to dinner comes to learn that dad Maurice (Kenan Thompson) has taken up performing peculiar acts on a site called CamFansOnly. See the skit here.
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