Only Fans Empty Promises – It’s false advertising and marketing that will make India’s Call Center Scams look almost legit by comparison.
Only Fans empty promises have lured in over 5 million creators making it a very successful platform. However, the average (indeed the majority) of creators don’t make enough to cover their utilities. Despite their hard work and creativity, they’ve probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than earning $1,000 or better in a month.
A lottery ticket is normally equal to the cost of a cup of coffee. The lottery commissions promote the possibility of fulfilling dreams but they make no promises. You buy a ticket and hope for the best. The overwhelming vast majority of people know that the odds are seriously against them winning the jackpot. By comparison, Only Fans sells the illusion that almost anyone can reap those same dream payouts with a little hard work, if they are willing to put their private life and private parts on display.
Motivated by the lure of money and possible fame, rarely creators can depend on the platform as their primary source of income. When Only Fans peaked in 2023, the average female account earned only $180 /month while males earned approximately $150. For every dollar the site processes, they take 20 cents. But with less than 50 employees, the owner makes hundreds of millions each year. The 80 cents left over is not so evenly distributed. 70% of the rest of the money is allocated to the top tiered creators; those who have the teams behind them. (Teams that still have to be paid from those jaw-dropping incomes that Only Fans proudly proclaims are being made by individual celebrities, or influencers.) The remaining 4.5 million creators split the rest, making less than a living wage, with some making nothing at all. Averaged out per dollar, where the site takes 20 cents, the remaining 90% of creators split only 18 cents.
Street Walkers compared to Only Fans models
When sexuality is involved, and women are literally fishing for interested men, it’s going to attract many who have a very dark opinion of those women. The constant pressure to engage with fans, opens creators up to hateful vitriol to say the least. When the payouts promised never materialize, many sacrifice personal limitations trying to find that magic mix which will make them popular. The sense of compromising oneself coupled with the ever present degradation by so called fans, leaves many questioning their life choices. For some, they give up, and walk away from the platforms, for others, they go deeper into the sex industry.
Comparatively, a hooker can earn more with less work and enjoys greater privacy. Without a doubt, there are greater risks to physical safety and threat of diseases for a street walker. Healthy children never say they want to become sex workers when they grow up. The people who sell sexual services using their own body, enter the profession for many reasons, most often they need to earn money and they have limited options. Cam models and content creators, may not start off with that same level of desperation. But after investing time and money in equipment, makeup and software, and never seeing returns, panic sets in. When they fail on platforms like Only Fans, and the vast majority do, many move on and become prostitutes. This is because their experience has been the psychological equivalent of whoring themselves, and direct prostitution is both more lucrative and easier.
Factor in that government, with its idiocy based wisdom, instituted FOSTA and SESTA act and has shut down sites where adult service providers could safely advertise their availability. What’s happening is that the number young people taking to the streets is increasing. The world’s oldest profession can never be eliminated, but it does adapt. An adaptation that trades safety and comfort for cash in hand. The greater the rules, the greater the risks to be taken, and the less offered as payment. Often it’s too little too late, and for those cases, Only Fans and government have blood on their hands.
Only Fans is not easy money
The work required to break into the top 10%, doesn’t leave a creator with enough to time to sleep, let alone have anything else going on in their lives. Compared to the demands of engaging with fans and driving traffic to their profile, content creation is by far less time consuming and relatively straight forward. Both on Only Fans and on social media, engagement marketing has been likened to a form of self-enslavement. In the majority of situations, greater than 99% of those expressing an interest in a creator will NEVER put a dime in the creator’s pocket. On social media it is generally accepted that only 1 in 100 will ever click a link. And for every thousand that click a link, 999 are looking for more free content.
Should a creator become lucky enough to become part of the top 10% of earners – They are officially large enough to attract the attention of management companies who work on commission. A quick google search shows a multitude of such companies offering everything from AI assisted social media promotions to 24/7 chatters.
The chatters break Only Fans rules. Yet everyone who makes a consistent living wage, needs someone to go through and respond to those direct messages and to up-sell. The volume of traffic required and the number of people that must be engaged with to be in the top 10% of earners, is an impossible job for one person. Add in the absolute necessity for new content creation and it’s clear that a management team is needed.
Management companies handle the work of engagement and sales. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the creator never interfaces with subscribers, the smart ones do at least for the VIPs. Unfortunately, this means that fans subscribed to a big earner are most likely getting ripped off. They’re paying for direct access to the creator and instead they’re talking to people who are pretending to be the influencer. And the propaganda of millions earned to a to entice new sign-ups, is a lie. Because the management team that makes those numbers possible is also taking a cut, often 50%.
PayPal and hypocrisy
New accounts are bombarded with predatorial freeloaders who spend long hours trying to trick models into giving them free access or content. But worse, are the scam artists who use stolen credit cards or have the intention of issuing a charge-back. Only Fans owes a large part of their success to the fact that they offer PayPal as a payment method. PayPal’s policies are not adult friendly and the platform gets around this because they keep their database private. They never divulge how much of their content is family friendly and how much is porn and there’s zero access without registering a credit card.
Only Fans always wins
Accepting PayPal is financially risky for creators because charge-backs are allowed. ( https://infloww.com/blog/onlyfans-chargebacks). This is often a huge wake-up call for models because, like most of society, they depend on the money they’ve made. Only Fans users have up until 120 days after a transaction (subscriptions excluded) to ask for their money back because of non-fulfillment, a hacked account or stolen credit card. For many the shame of having a porn related charge on their credit statement is worse than the idea of ripping off someone. Only Fans noted this callous attitude of customer claiming charge-backs back in 2021, and instead of getting rid of adult, they made a clear means for clients to ask Only Fans to intervene directly. This actually has a two-fold effect, one it identifies abusers to the platform (who get their account deleted) and two it stops Only Fans from having problems with the banks, because they just pass the expense onto the creators.
When a creator has had enough and wants to delete their account, they’re stopped from doing so until the last subscription has ended. The option to ethically walk away when they’re depleted can’t be fulfilled until Only Fans has squeezed the last dollar possible from their work. Businesses exist to make money, so this practice comes as no surprise. Albeit, there are more reputable ways to deal with the situation despite being less profitable.
Only Fans often keeps all of a creator’s money too
There’s a fine line between capitalism and brutal exploitation. Only Fans crosses that line when they terminate a creator’s account because of a violation of their Terms Of Service. (T.O.S) The site’s T.O.S frequently change and what was allowed today can become prohibited next week. To be clear, the restrictions are NOT to prevent child porn, animal abuse, etc. Such things are already illegal and are law enforcement’s jurisdiction. What’s being banned are ‘niche’ acts which are mostly the type of personas the creators portray, what kinds of verbal vulgarities they’re allowed to say and how (if any) penetration occurs. A good example is of this is race play in which a person of color pays a cam model to use racial slurs. – It’s distasteful to mainstream society, but it’s very popular kink. And according to many who have had their accounts deleted, there doesn’t seem to be a recourse to dispute these terminations, and what happens to their money is unknown, but it’s never given to them.
It’s called slavery when someone other than yourself reaps the benefits of your hard work without compensating you. The Only Fans business model is a slick game of marketing which borders on corporate propaganda. The platform plays upon your hopes and dreams in order to trick you to uploading your creations. – The site doesn’t market you. It doesn’t drive traffic to your profile. It doesn’t help you produce content. And it doesn’t even protect you from credit card charge backs.
What Only Fans provides you, is a place to host your content and payment processing. For these two things you pay them 20% of everything you earn. Whereas, a smart creator knows that website hosting can be found for as little as $5 a month or they can just sell directly by creating a Telegram group. Using crypto to process payments is free with zero possibility of a charge back. Furthermore, you can also produce any kind of legal content you wish without fear of breaching someone’s arbitrary Terms Of Service.
Only Fans can claim to be anything it likes, but the reality is it’s just a middle man with a catalog of competition. No one truly needs them, and without them all the money you make is yours to keep. Your hopes and dreams are what Only Fans exploits to lure you in. But after you sign up and start uploading content, you’ll quickly find out that you’ve been hustled. Suckered like millions of other hopeful creators.
So for those who are considering creating adult content to earn a living. — Remember your goal is to enrich yourself and not to put more money in the pockets of billionaires. So be pragmatic instead of being a sucker.
