"Nudes? Shouldn't I charge for these?" : Exploring What Motivates Content Creation on OnlyFans

Vaughn Hamilton, Ananta Soneji, Allison McDonald, Elissa M. Redmiles

Abstract: With over 1.5 million content creators, OnlyFans is one of the fastest growing subscription-based social media platforms. The platform is primarily associated with sexual content. Thus, OnlyFans creators are uniquely positioned at the intersection of professional social media content creation and sex work. While the experiences and motivations of experienced sex workers to adopt OnlyFans have been studied, in this work we seek to understand the motivations of creators who had not previously done sex work. Through a qualitative interview study of 22 U.S.-based OnlyFans creators, we find that beyond the typical motivations for pursuing gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), our participants were motivated by three key factors: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans; (2) platform design and affordances such as boundary setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives; and (3) the pandemic, as OnlyFans provided an enormous opportunity to overcome lockdown-related issues.