Original subtitles

[waves crashing]

[intriguing music]

This whole thing about OnlyFans isn't a new idea.

People have been trying it for many years

and it's actually been a very popular thing.

Because OnlyFans technically wasn't supposed to be porn,

it was supposed to be exclusive content.

You know, at the time there were so many other companies

trying to replicate what OnlyFans had already mastered.

So everybody's signing up on OnlyFans

and just selling their masturbation videos.

I'm like, why not? I could do the same thing.

I used to fuck my fans

and post those videos on my OnlyFans.

I originally started with web camming.

I was found by a recruiter who was like,

"hey, have you ever thought about doing porn?"

I had 26, just become freshly single.

And then I started dating this guy who was just a total dirt bag.

I was a dancer for years.

I was traveling out in Vegas.

From as early as I can remember,

I was always chasing girls around the playground.

A lot of the guys from my Twitch community would come in and say,

"make an OnlyFans, make an OnlyFans."

And I'm like, "oh, I'm not... I would never do that."

They can connect with that audience directly

and they can make thousands a day.

And that's why we're seeing these top 1% creators

buying Lamborghini Uruses and mansions in Beverly Hills.

I didn't even really think it was like a career or an industry.

Girls these days are only focused on their own things.

But now girls are getting all this attention on social media.

Human beings are looking for their interactivity on social media.

People who are desperate to make money.

People who have money and are desperate for interaction.

And it created a perfect storm

to make OnlyFans one of the largest social media platforms in the world.

Hi, I'm Adria Rae.

I'm Dan Dangler.

I'm Amber Marie.

I'm Kenzie Ann.

[clapperboard clattering]

And this is the Rise of OnlyFans.

[suspenseful music]

This whole thing about OnlyFans isn't a new idea.

People have been trying it for many years,

and it's actually been a very popular thing.

It was called Solo Sites.

Solo Girls Sites were very popular

as little as five or ten years ago.

Thomas Stokely, who founded OnlyFans,

actually was already kind of an adult industry

entrepreneur at the time.

He had founded a couple websites.

One of them notably was called Glamworship.

The other one was called Customs4U.

These were basically sites where he was trying to develop that

relationship between the audience and the creator,

and kind of cut out the middleman, the studio.

The first time I ever heard about it was my agent at the time,

and the agents were trying to sign us up

so they would get a kickback or they'd get a percentage of sales.

Stokely really saw the vision that if you could connect

the creator directly to the consumer,

that as a platform you could make tons of money.

I remember the first site I was on was Patreon.

They generate nudity, sexual contents,

at the beginning of their sites.

These are basically websites where the creator

just posts their videos and then somebody can pay for them.

This all turned itself around.

In 2016, he hadn't really experienced a lot of success.

He goes to his dad, who gave him a $10,000 loan.

His dad basically tells him,

"this is the last money I'm giving you."

Teams up with his brother,

and they build out what today is OnlyFans,

which has done billions of dollars.

So the first time I heard of OnlyFans

was at one of the adult entertainment conventions.

They had actually had a booth there and were kind of like

approaching different porn stars and different people

in the industry kind of being like,

"hey, you know, we have this platform."

I saw a bunch of my other fellow performers

hopping on the platform, and I thought, you know,

what a cool way to like push content

that I already had on my phone.

A lot of people moved, to our worst, to OnlyFans.

How I got started, it was very different, you know.

It's like I started off modeling

and kind of like ended up in the adult industry.

When I was modeling, I was always open to being nude

and all that stuff or whatever, but the majority of the photos we take

was things that would be safe for Instagram.

I was always open to it.

I just didn't... when I started OnlyFans,

I just didn't know that that's what the fans wanted.

They wanted to see more.

And so as I met people in Miami and I worked in the industry

and I kind of really realized like, you know,

what the fans wanted.

When I first started, I had known of some girls,

you know, making good money,

and I just kind of reached out enough to where I became friends

with those girls, started collabing with those,

getting on their pages, then meeting the people they know,

but just learning from that.

[pensive music]

Throughout the course of history,

we are one of the most innovative species

when it comes to technology.

Credit cards, when credit cards first came out,

the first uses for credit cards

were actually for online payments for adult content.

VHSs, DVDs, DVDs started taking off because of the adult industry.

Audio equipment, 4K, the internet, even now, online

the majority of content is actual adult content.

VR, the adult industry, we're the ones

taking a chance on this new tech.

At the time, Snapchat was like the big thing.

If you had personal content on your phone,

like amateur videos or things like that,

you would have like a private Snapchat.

The app would crash all the time.

It was just annoying.

So we had a platform,

but it wasn't like perfected

because doing everything on Snapchat was really annoying.

So when OnlyFans came around it was

very, very like attractive to somebody like me.

Around 2018,

Stokely sells 75% of the company

to a very famous adult industry founder, Leonard Radvinsky,

who was actually the founder and owner of MyFreeCams,

one of the largest adult campsites in the world.

As soon as Radvinsky gets involved,

now we start seeing some huge numbers.

Radvinsky really saw the vision of being able to create

that interactivity between creator and consumer.

The majority of adult content porn consumers,

I don't have the exact number,

but I'd say nine out of ten porn consumers are men.

They're the ones spending a lot of the money on it

from just the analytics and a lot of the porn that

we see as kind of base for the male gaze.

How did this go from a relatively successful

but obscure website,

to a part of mainstream culture

that is almost impossible to not see?

The community was just growing at like substantial speed.

So that was why I got on it.

It seemed like I wanted to be somewhere where more people were,

and that was OnlyFans.

One of the biggest catalysts that is often overlooked

that really, truly led to the rise

and positioning of OnlyFans today

was COVID -19.

I was late to the party.

I heard about it when everyone else did.

Right when COVID hit, it was like, boom.

Pandemic hit, everything shut down.

More people are working from home.

More people are using the internet,

and more people are desperate for money

than ever before in our lifetime.

I started at the most impeccable time.

I couldn't have gotten deep into the online community

at a better time in the history of the online community.

OnlyFans at the time,

they were begging performers

when it first came out to join the platform.

Until the pandemic, when they stopped,

they shut down professional shooting.

I thought I was going to be in Guess.

I thought I was going to be in all these big brands

to where I was like, I'm working from home now.

The clubs are closed. I'm not dancing anymore.

I don't have work anymore.

So I'm just doing OnlyFans.

Everybody is quarantined, staying at home and nothing to do.

So everybody is signing up on OnlyFans

and just selling their masturbation videos.

I'm like, why not? I could do the same thing

and make a living off that.

So we pretty much left our own devices to fend for ourselves.

And that's when OnlyFans started taking off for myself

and a lot of my peers.

When COVID hit, any girl that dropped an OnlyFans

made 40 grand, 50 grand,

whatever, depending on their popularity.

You were first, you sold your nudes, okay, you made money.

During COVID, there was hundreds of thousands of people

that were out of work.

They needed to survive.

You know, they were going to OnlyFans to shoot content

because, say, they were a teacher or they were a dentist, whatever.

Like, they were losing their jobs as well.

It wasn't just the adult industry that was losing work.

This girl is selling her nudes.

You know, this girl in Toronto is selling her nudes that we all know.

You can go buy her nudes?

That's crazy. Let's go check it out.

What's the site called? OnlyFans, okay.

And now another girl just dropped in OnlyFans.

What?

I had just started up my new business venture

of the online sex work community.

And all anybody was doing at that time was being home,

and that's all I was doing.

So I was home working my ass off and making a lot of money.

[chuckles]

I was working towards trying to direct

and move more behind the camera right before COVID-19 hit.

And then the pandemic hit,

and it enforced a lot of testing regulations on our industry

that were very strict and were changing all the time.

Pandemic hit.

There was no more flying out to L.A., anything like that.

So what I did was I networked with girls in Miami

who had OnlyFans who were starting to blow up in the industry

and the world over there and started to make a lot of money.

It definitely increased my revenue for sure.

It increased my revenue on everything because

people were just home, and my job is being on the internet in general,

whether it's streaming or OnlyFans,

so it definitely increased my income.

And I remember the boys' group chats just being electric.

You know, we're all bored at home during COVID,

nothing to talk about, and then,

oh, this girl just dropped an OF, how is it?

Let's share money on an account. [laughs]

Oh, it's 80 bucks to see her naked? 20 each then, you know.

It made directing and producing incredibly hard.

We're having to do 24-hour COVID testing

on top of the STD testing standards that we already have,

ultimately led me to kind of stepping away

from directing and producing

because it was just way too much on my plate.

I was able to take the the skills that I was using

for a company directing and producing,

and I was able to just use it for myself.

That was when I launched everything.

That was when I started camming

and then that was when I broke through with my OnlyFans.

And I had so much fun filming my OnlyFans

because it was right when the pandemic was starting.

I bought some camera.

I knew nothing about YouTube how to use it,

and I actually started taking professional photos

and videos of myself that I was loading to my OnlyFans

and editing myself.

And I was having fun like in this online world that

involved nobody else but me.

With the rise of OnlyFans like the big name porn stars,

they weren't shooting for the production companies anymore

because they were making more money shooting their own content

from their own home.

Up until this point, it was very standard for production studios

to play flat rates to girls and performers, in general, to perform.

Some of those rates on the high end

were considered maybe thousands a day.

On the low end, it could be as low as hundreds.

What the production companies would do is they would actually

take the creators and they would pay them as talent

and then they would own the content

and then they would go on and distribute it

and make tons of money from it.

You make this scene with this company

and you get paid $2,000,

let's say, back then, not that much.

And whatever flat rate they got to do that shoot that day,

that's what they got and very often, no royalties.

So they would have to show up on set, nine hours, film,

and then get their pay, go home.

And then they go and they sell it

and they put it out there and they make

thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars off it.

Well, OnlyFans is giving people the opportunity to make that money

themselves without the middle man.

OnlyFans, for sure,

absolutely gave creators for the first time

a place to really monetize the brand they built for themselves.

So sure, they get paid to show up on set

and do their shoot for the production companies,

but it's not the same money at all as they're making on OnlyFans.

There were porn stars that capitalized on their name

that they had created through porn

and having all their content on Pornhub, per se.

And then they were using that clout on OnlyFans to monetize.

So they're taking their name and their image

from what they created to OnlyFans to make money.

One girl I know is making 1.5 million a month.

Another one I'm tight with showed me her account.

She's making $850,000 a month.

They're not getting that from the production companies.

That's all about the O.F.

I quit porn because I kept getting sick.

I was always on antibiotics when I was filming.

It was awful.

You're sharing so many germs on set.

So when you're home and creating content,

you just have more access versus when you're on set.

I mean, when you're on set,

you're not sitting there on your OnlyFans chatting with

your biggest spenders and making sure that somebody who just tipped

is getting what they just tipped for.

Definitely quitting was a skyrocketing

concept for my business.

When you are taking away, like,

physical exhaustion that porn actually gives you, you're tired.

You don't want to go home and make the custom that requires you

to do your makeup again, and do something physical that maybe

your body can't do after shooting a porn scene.

On OnlyFans they get to choose where they shoot at their own home.

They get to film it themselves 45 minutes

with a guy that they're comfortable with.

They get to edit out the parts they don't want, cut it,

sell it themselves, make hundreds of thousands,

millions of dollars off it.

The process, like, I enjoy going to set because a lot of the companies

I've been shooting for so long,

so I have a relationship with the producers or the crew.

They're like family. Like, there's some people in this industry

that I've known for so long, they're like family to me.

So if I'm shooting from my home, you know,

I don't get to see these people. If I'm on set, it's cool.

It's like a little reunion where I get to hang out

with my friends and my peers.

On amateur sets, I shoot from home.

Don't have to worry about opening up the camera.

Don't have to worry about directors.

Don't have to worry about, if we want to take a break,

we can take a break.

Yeah, it's just easier. It's just more relaxed.

It's more, it's just more informal.

Now, the typical split on OnlyFans is around 80% to the creator

and approximately 20% to the platform.

That's great for OnlyFans as well

because the credit card processing really only costs them

somewhere around three to five percent.

So they're basically taking 15% margin

just for providing a website.

My OnlyFans actually was not thriving

while I was in production.

Once I quit, my OnlyFans turned over

because I was finally home again all the time.

And when you're home and you're creating content

and you're doing this solo one on one time,

in my experience, you're making the best production that you can sell.

You have your marketing down.

You know when to make TikToks, when to post on Instagram,

when to Twitter, when to Telegram.

I strictly do OnlyFans.

I've thought about in the past getting into the adult industry

after getting into OnlyFans,

but decided it wasn't what's best for my brand

because there's more money working for yourself

than there is working in porn.

But it's still great for the creators, because the creators,

if they're making 75% or 80% of the money themselves,

they no longer need to go work for $200 a day

or for even $1,000 a day.

The production companies pretend that they're supporting it,

but I think deep down they don't like it,

because I know for a fact, some of the production companies,

they'll put a boy and a girl together

and they'll make them wipe off all their makeup

and change out of their outfits,

go home in separate cars after they shoot

because what a lot of people are doing,

they'll show up on set, then they'll be like,

"do you wanna fuck again for our content?"

And the production company is like, "whoa, whoa, whoa."

If you're gonna fuck again in this house, in the same makeup,

in the same outfit, and then put it on your OnlyFans,

who the fuck's gonna buy our tape,

that we just spent all this production for?

So the crazy thing about OnlyFans is it had never been

initially created solely for the purpose

of connecting adult creators with consumers.

It was really meant to be a platform that musicians would use

to connect with their audiences and sell their music directly.

It was a platform for artists or dancers or fitness instructors

to be able to teach courses on.

That was the original vision for OnlyFans.

The perpetuation of adult content on OnlyFans

was almost completely driven by the Visa and MasterCard ban on Pornhub.

[suspenseful music]

So towards the end of 2020,

OnlyFans receives a holy grail that they could have never expected.

The world's largest adult website, Pornhub,

gets their credit card processing pulled by Visa and MasterCard.

Basically, there was content going on Pornhub

that wasn't legally shot.

Some people were even saying that there was

videos of minors on the site.

Pornhub's not a big model, it's like a big webcam site,

it's more so a collective of porn.

When Visa and MasterCard canceled with Pornhub,

a lot of their processing was lost when they made that switch.

What does this lead to?

It leads for the biggest exodus of content creators,

specifically adult content creators, from Pornhub to OnlyFans,

desperate for anywhere to sell their content and continue earning income.

The movement of content creators

went from the webcam platforms to OnlyFans.

That's where they lived and then they went to OnlyFans.

I was on Pornhub before they got banned,

like Visa and everything.

I have a big income on Pornhub just posting videos,

so one day they just started banning all the videos,

taking down videos.

It was weird when it happened because all of us porn performers

already had OnlyFans and whatnot,

but everybody kind of started jumping onto it

and the traffic on it started getting crazy.

Pornhub's more of an aggregate,

more of a library of pornography and adult content,

and then the web camming sites are a whole different beast.

There was definitely mass exodus from the webcamming sites

to OnlyFans for sure.

What did this do for OnlyFans?

This was the opportunity of a lifetime

that I don't think any of them,

including Stokely, could have ever seen coming.

Back when everything started in the adult entertainment industry,

girls relied on the production companies to get anything out.

It was all they had. It was their only choice.

It was kind of like a perfect storm.

Like all of these girls had the opportunity

to make a bunch of money from their homes.

All of this traffic is getting driven there from Pornhub,

and so it made OnlyFans into this monster that it is now. [chuckles]

What ends up happening is all these cam girls

and all these adult actresses who are using Pornhub

as a platform to sell their content through,

all of a sudden have no way to make money,

no way to accept payments, and nowhere to go.

There's two ways performers look at it.

They would either upload their content on Pornhub

to monetize it when they could at the time,

or there was performers that would just, with the good graces,

they would be cool with their content being uploaded on Pornhub

because it would give them more visibility.

In my case, for example, I have 600 million views on Pornhub,

so that's a lot of free publicity for me.

I was very scared that when I lose a big chunk of income from Pornhub,

but some of the fans would move to OnlyFans to watch those contents.

The people who are most successful on the platform

are ones that already have large

established audiences somewhere else,

and they're able to move that audience over there,

cut out the production company, cut out the middle man,

and then get more of that revenue.

OnlyFans changed a lot for a lot of people.

It allowed some cam girls and some porn girls

to make way more money than they were making before.

With the sex industry, when it comes to porn,

it's like you've got a lot more people

where it's like a lot more girls,

they're not even gonna get into porn now

because they could just do it themselves.

All the girls now, the new ones,

are only going on the mainstream sites

to promote their OnlyFans, or to promote their name,

to promote their brand.

I still use a professional production company.

I still shoot for them, like MindGeek, Brazzers, Vixen.

To be honest, I think that's just for marketing purposes. [laughs]

They can jump into my OnlyFans to see my personal videos,

to get some custom videos, which means like homemade videos.

I could just have my phone, you know, like not really

professional angles and the shaking angles,

they can just see homemade videos,

which is I think some of my fans love that.

They are literally making more than movie stars are

because some of these girls who have built up big followings

and moved them successfully over to the platform

are able to really write their own paychecks

and they're able to create unlimited subscription revenue for themselves,

which was never a possibility when they were working directly

with production companies that control the whole industry.

None of these girls, really, unless they were like the top five,

were millionaires from doing this stuff.

So this is very fresh that the biggest names in porn

are now all multi-millionaires, all of them.

That is brand new.

So it used to be like, "oh porn star, okay, she does porn."

But now it's like, "oh, porn star",

"richer than the top music artists today,"

"richer than our celebrity friends, richer than the best lawyer,"

these girls are just doing shit at home.

They quit porn and some of them just do nudes, example, Mia Khalifa,

who's one of the most watched porn stars ever on Pornhub.

She's only done I think eight scenes,

but she does OnlyFans now.

She's top five earner in the world,

doesn't show her nipples.

So she's a multi multi millionaire

because she did porn, now just doing OF,

not even showing herself,

making millions and millions and millions of dollars,

millions a month.

Although there are creators

that are very successful on the OnlyFans platform,

some of them even making millions of dollars a year.

One of the huge misconceptions that the public has about the platform

is that everybody on OnlyFans becomes

automatically financially successful.

OnlyFans isn't cheap, you know.

I spend 10K a month on promo for my page

and girls who don't spend that they don't make much money.

People do OnlyFans and they think of it almost like a dancing,

like being a stripper just like

"I'm gonna start OnlyFans and I'm gonna make all this money,"

with what platform, with what traction, with what anything?

You don't have any network.

It doesn't work like that, you don't just drop OnlyFans

and all of a sudden people see you.

A lot of people think

"well, I can quit my job and I can go do OnlyFans."

But the reality is about 90% of the revenue

goes to less than 1% of the creators.

You are not gonna be successful in content creating

if you don't know yourself or where your boundary is.

If you're gonna let your fans push you to do something

that you're not comfortable with,

you're not laying your boundaries down initially.

Your fans should know what they're getting with you.

And then your boundary is that

you slowly open up to your fans, should be rewards,

like hey this is my first time I've ever done

whatever fetish whatever niche you're selling,

and use that to market.

Because you're gonna make more money with your boundaries.

I'm just trying to jam up

my income trying to come up with these creative ideas.

How to track my fans to join my OnlyFans.

So I come up with the idea for the raffle.

$20 for each raffle.

Some people will spend thousands of dollars on raffle.

The biggest reward is they can fuck me

in real life, in person.

Some of the fans got a lot of the raffle

but they did not win,

so they kind of get jealous, so they reported me.

On OnlyFans that's how I got banned

for about a year and a half, I would say.

That life was not fun at all.

You know some people don't have large audiences

and maybe they don't make that much on their OnlyFans,

so doing the production company is great

but even then it's still promotion for their OnlyFans in the long run.

I try to interact with them personally.

So I try to live stream a lot.

That's really big with connecting with people.

They can see your mannerisms, how you are,

how you joke about things, laugh,

and they can relate to you.

And then I also try to do little vlogs

of just stuff that I'm doing, you know, fun things that I'm going to,

whether it be an event or a shoot that I'm doing,

or a collab that I'm doing with a girl.

I really try to involve them in the process as well

so that they feel like they're a part of what I'm doing.

During COVID everybody's trying to make money.

Money was great and was pretty easy, but after,

towards the end of the COVID, it's slowing down a little bit.

[suspenseful music]

We go back to August, 2021.

OnlyFans, under Stokely's leadership,

decides that they're going to pull out of adult content.

That sends the adult creator community into a whirlwind.

I was like, oh no.

It was like a catastrophe in the world happening.

I remember that happening and I was like, "uh oh",

this is going to kill OnlyFans.

This is the reason I heard of OnlyFans.

My first reaction was,

well, all the girls are going to come back

to shooting porn now that left. [chuckles]

Everyone's faces dropped, like...

My reaction was sort of like everybody else online freaking out.

I laughed at that because

people aren't going to OnlyFans to watch a girl's cooking show

or to read a book to them.

It's at least 95% of the content

and money made on that website is for adult content.

It was scary.

OnlyFans is mostly where my income is coming from.

That's the big part.

If I lose that side then the biggest thing is gone.

And that week was just insane.

It was just everyone freaking out.

And it was all these new opportunists like Playboy

and all these other ones like,

"well, come to us, come to us, come to us."

And all these like, "one of the OnlyFans companies are saying",

don't worry, we got it, we got it."

And everyone's freaking, "well, which one are you gonna go to?"

What the fuck, what are we gonna do?"

I do have to start from like ground zero to build up my fan base.

The process of getting fans back towards the other platform,

which is the harder part.

I was just like, "I'm just gonna film a bunch of porn."

I mean, my paychecks with porn were fantastic

and I could just continue to max that out.

They weighed the benefit and the negatives and stuff, you know,

the money versus, is it worth putting

my body out there to everybody?

And so for all those girls who already put their body out

and now they weren't going to be able to like make money

on their OnlyFans, I was a little bit saddened for them.

I'm like, "oh, that sucks."

"Oh my God, now I'm going to have to get back to mainstream."

The girls that quit, like it was everyone losing their fucking minds.

And that was insane to watch

because it was really like the world was ending.

It seemed like it.

So my plan B was to get into production

like I was and just shoot a lot,

and then switch over to a different platform.

We had celebrities leaving their fucking OnlyFans accounts.

We had people dropping their agencies.

Everybody was coming out of the woodwork for sex workers

and because we built the platform.

Why did he do that? He was probably being put under a lot of pressure

by the same regulators and the same merchant processing executives

that were coming after Pornhub.

They saw what had happened to Pornhub,

Pornhub losing their ability to monetize

through credit card payment processors.

So I think they saw the same thing potentially happening to them.

They're like, "shit, we need to sell"

before we lose our ability to monetize."

Stokely comes out and he tries to ban adult creators on OnlyFans.

This is a platform that's making all of its money off of what I do on it.

There's no way they're canceling us out.

Obviously, it was alarming to everybody,

but at the same time it's like

marketing geniuses.

I was shocked.

I was surprised.

I put on my business owner hat.

I'm like, how the fuck is this company going to survive?

But I also had this suspicion that it wasn't real.

It was a really great way for them to build traction.

We had celebrities where it's like Tyga, for instance,

who had an OnlyFans agency,

who had his own OnlyFans that was making,

I think it was like six mil a month,

went viral and posted him deleting his entire account.

Everybody was panicking.

All the people that I know is on OnlyFans was panicking.

And they started telling their fans, at OnlyFans,

"oh, you can't go on the other platform."

Here is where you can see me for the same content.

They would never be able to delete porn and stuff like that

because what that would do is like,

there's plenty of people who has bought the content.

And when you buy content as a fan on OnlyFans,

it saves you your balls.

So what that would mean is that you would have to remove

all of the content that you sold that fan.

So as a company,

that they would have to either give those people their money back

or they would be, it would be liable,

they could get sued up the fucking ass and lose everything.

Stokely is under tons of pressure,

he's getting backlash from the creators,

he's getting backlash from Visa and MasterCard

who are putting pressure on him.

They would be tanking their business.

There would be no way in hell that company would be able to survive

if they canned the adult industry.

Six days later, Stokely does a U turn,

decides, you know what, we're not going to

eliminate and fully ban adult creators.

And then they shut it down and they announce that they will maintain

their relationship and to hold adult content creators on their website.

We are going to allow adult creators

to continue using the platform.

When it came back, everyone was celebrating,

there was parades, it felt like, [laughs] you know.

That was my first highest month

because they brought so much attention back to the platform.

Oh, thank God, everyone was so happy, high-fiving, dancing.

People were going out that night, someone threw a party,

like it was a big day.

It does make it tough, you know,

if you're shooting and whatnot, more girls come in,

there's going to be a bigger pool of girls,

going to be less demand for you, of course.

I have a lot of friends, they were doing OnlyFans for a long time

that would have never got into pro-porn

and then kind of dipped their toes in,

and now are working for companies like Brazzers and Vixen

and stuff like that, so it's kind of weird.

In a weird way,

it definitely kind of like harmonized the communities.

There's free porn on the internet forever,

if OnlyFans was about things being free and just jerking off,

porn would be out of business and porn isn't.

I'm really glad that OnlyFans stayed,

so we were able to keep up our income and be happy.

I think OnlyFans kind of understands that we helped kind of

create the traffic that's there.

It put us back on the map, back on the radar,

it was really good for us.

The average creator on OnlyFans,

in fact probably more than 75% of the creators on the platform,

make less than $600 a month from it.

I used to think, okay, porn is easy, you know,

you're hot, you go get fucked on camera, you get paid, whatever.

It's an easy thing any girl can do

and if you're above a six, you'll make it.

But the reality is, it's like any other industry in the world,

to get to the top it's the hardest workers.

It's really hard to convince people

to join OnlyFans nowadays.

What do I have to post on social media

to like let them click the link?

Going on OnlyFans and making a life-changing decision

about putting yourself on the internet permanently like that

doesn't always mean it's going to translate to financial success.

I know a lot of girls who are porn stars, famous porn stars,

and they get on OnlyFans and they don't make shit.

It's one of those things where they don't go hand-in-hand.

Our fans use their profiles the same way that we use ours.

They're posting things over there, so they want attention too,

it's very much set up like Facebook.

So it's completely different.

It's hard.

You know, it's like I have tons of content that I dropped there,

you know, it's like I hope they buy it.

Building a brand, though, is number one.

It's one of the hardest things to do.

It's not about the prettiest anymore at all.

You'll see the most beautiful girls that are making,

you know, 5K a month,

and you'll see just a girl who works her fucking ass off

making 500K a month.

There's no business where you're going to make

over 100K a month where you didn't invest into your business.

I have to come up with a concept.

Okay, maybe we should go to the pool,

do some fun pool bikini jumping around short videos

to get them joining my OnlyFans.

The hardest thing is to build your community.

The real way of engaging in the crowd

that is already on OnlyFans

is by using other creators to help your profile perform.

So if I see somebody who I know is making more money than me,

I'm going to offer them a certain amount of money

to advertise a photo of me

with a link directly to my OnlyFans.

Female creators make a lot more money.

They have bigger platforms.

So sometimes they'll pay me to shoot with them.

They'll pay me my rate.

Sometimes if it's a smaller creator,

we'll just do a content share.

[suspenseful music]

It's really, really a standard practice

to talk about boundaries with people before you do a collab with them.

It's usually right before you're about to collab with them.

You say, "okay, so what are your boundaries?"

To know yourself and your boundaries before

you even put content out there is so important.

My mom always said,

"you go to sleep at night with your thoughts"

"and you have to be proud of yourself."

And so I always made sure that no matter what I did,

I went to bed and I didn't feel uncomfortable

or unsafe with what I'd produced.

It's really important to stick to those, especially for men,

because if men break a woman's boundary

that can get spread all within

the OnlyFans and adult community

and it can get you canceled.

So boundaries are very important.

I compare it to the NFL.

The women in the industry are like the running backs.

They come in for a couple years, they're the stars,

they score the touchdowns, they get all the points,

but they only have a couple years of longevity in it.

They get a beating, they get pounded up the middle.

You know, after a couple of years, they're done.

The men, we're like the kickers.

We can do it for 20, 30 years.

My whole family has always been supportive of what I do.

I've always been financially independent of them

since I've been an adult.

So their approval of what I do,

as long as it doesn't affect anybody negatively,

hasn't ever come up.

I've completely lost my family by their choice, not my choice.

I was okay with it.

I knew that it would draw my family away.

And those are all the things that I had to think about

before I made the decision to actually go through with it.

So they know what I do,

and they just completely disagree with it.

You know, they're very religious.

You know, they see it as immoral,

not as me expressing myself and being safe.

Maybe I shouldn't be on the internet.

Maybe I really just should find another job,

like be a normal girl,

never be showing my body or showing myself on the internet.

That's really, like I always think about it.

It makes me sad all the time.

And sometimes it makes me cry thinking about it.

Is my family comfortable with what I do for a living?

Probably not, but are they supportive?

Extremely yes, because I do extremely well for myself.

And at that point,

when you get to a certain level of money that you've made

and, you know, reputation to where it's kind of like,

I make enough money online to work,

what the fuck are you gonna say? [laughs]

But now, nowadays I'm like, fuck you.

I don't care what are you saying,

but while I look at the mirror, I'm the best. That's it.

On December 23rd, 2021,

Stokely steps down as CEO

and hands the baton over to Amrapali Gan,

the chief marketing officer who is so instrumental

in marketing the success of OnlyFans.

For a company that hasn't even been around for 10 years yet,

OnlyFans has seen a tremendous amount of growth.

They had a respectable 20 million users for some time,

but under the leadership of Amrapali Gan, the CEO,

they grew to over 200 million users,

with three million creators serving them.

This created a lot of pressure.

This created a lot of attention on the platform.

I think that when you're doing such awesome shit,

you're gonna get equally as many people telling you that you suck.

And that just kind of goes with the territory.

To say that negative comments online don't affect a person,

we're all affected.

The thing is that the energy exchange online is real.

So you are taking energy and absorbing.

I think that being strong and knowing where people are coming from

when they say things to you is more important.

It's okay, I don't let it get to me because

at the end of the day, I still pay my bills,

I still sit in my house, and they're just on my phone.

They're not on my face, so... [chuckles]

I don't really get that kind of hate on my page.

And if I did, I wouldn't give a fuck anyways. [chuckles]

You gotta respect the grinders.

No one can look at an OnlyFans girl

who has a beautiful car and be like,

"ah, fuck her, she doesn't work."

No. She's probably working harder than you, I guarantee it.

[gentle music]

The whole reason I started the OnlyFans

is because I want to open up an animal sanctuary.

It comes down to weighing whether or not it's worth it for you.

And for me, I saw animal sanctuary, rescuing animals.

It was hard, but it was worth getting rid of, you know,

sacrificing those other relationships

to get where I want to be.

One of the toughest things that I've dealt with

while being an adult performer is relationships.

It's always been hard,

whether I've dated other adult stars

or I've dated girls that aren't adult stars.

Both have their pros and cons,

but it's made dating tough because, you know,

I'm sharing my energy, I'm sharing sex,

I'm sharing myself with other people.

And a lot of healthy relationships, you know,

you're not really sharing your body like that.

So it's been difficult for me to kind of navigate that.

If I've had a girlfriend and I'm shooting all day,

I'm having sex on camera, I get home, like, I'm drained.

You can lose a lot of relationships, important relationships.

I've spent a lot of time with my therapist,

working on sexual trauma, the communication,

and all these sort of things I'm dealing with daily

because every single day you get a negative comment, at least one.

I do get negative comments under my posts

or my videos or everything.

At the beginning of my career,

I was really like attached to those hate comments.

I would think about them all the time.

It was stuck in my head all day long.

There's been times where, you know,

I've been dis-invited from functions.

I was doing some stuff with my university a few years ago.

I was mentoring entrepreneurs and people in business school.

Because I was in that same school, I owned, you know,

started up several businesses.

So I was helping some students.

One of the faculty members found out that I was an adult film star,

and she had an issue with it.

She's like, "oh, this kind of person"

"shouldn't be teaching our students, blah, blah, blah."

So I was getting, you know, some shit from a university.

The majority of the faculty

they were okay with it because they knew me as a person

and they're like "listen, we know him personally"

"like, okay, he does this for work

"but that doesn't disregard his knowledge for business"

"or who he is as a person."

So luckily I had people that had my back with that and fought for me.

People asked me about getting into the industry

and told them don't do it.

[laughs] Don't do it.

It's not for everyone, it's really nice, it's tough.

A lot of guys that get into the industry

professionally they don't last because it's definitely grueling,

especially the mental aspect of it.

Not everyone can stay rock solid on command

with the room full of people

watching them in a high pressure situation.

It's just not everyone's built for it.

[pensive music]

If my OnlyFans were never gotten deleted

I probably wouldn't jump into professional porn.

I do know a lot of people have been more influenced to

get into porn, who may have never done that,

simply because they want to grow a brand,

so they can have an OnlyFans following.

What's very interesting about OnlyFans is

lately especially there's been a very big decrease

in beautiful women's numbers

and the average girl next door,

the six, the seven, the attainable women

are who making the most money.

OnlyFans is kind of personal,

you're in there messaging them, you're talking to them.

Guys feel like they're shooting their shot.

Girls that they see like in L.A. that are ten out of tens,

that are always around celebrities.

They're not making that much anymore.

Like it inspires me

to see people online that are having fun

shooting for themselves

but I just don't have the courage to do it

if I haven't got lost of my OnlyFans.

Don't get into OnlyFans or being a content creator

if you're not a content creator,

because that's the biggest misconception,

I know a lot of people that get into the industry because thinking that,

oh, it's fast money and they hear this thing,

they're gonna make a quick buck.

If you don't like it, you're not gonna do well.

As any content creator will tell you,

we have to be our own production house,

we have to be our own accountants,

we have to be our own marketers, our own managers.

We have to feed ourselves, cook for ourselves, clean up after ourselves.

We gotta do everything for ourselves

and so you run into a lot of different problems

when you wear that many hats.

And I think the best way to overcome

any of those challenges is to just not give up.

[suspenseful music]

In July of 2023,

Amrapali Gan steps down as CEO

and is followed by Keily Blair.

Now Keily was originally

the Chief Strategy and Operations Officer for OnlyFans

and she was also instrumental in the growth of the platform.

She's pegged a CEO, and they go from there.

Moving forward, I think the adult entertainment

is just gonna become bigger and bigger.

Really, it's guys, it's fantasy, and it's guys thinking,

"I wanna date this girl, I wanna fuck this girl."

Porn's always gonna need new faces,

it's always gonna need girls to shoot,

it's always gonna be there,

because it's just this giant mega industry

that it's never gonna go away.

What I most like is when I'm out in public,

and people would come up to me, and just say,

"oh my God, hi Nicole, I am a big fan, I love your video."

That's the most rewarding thing for me.

I feel like, okay, so now I'm in the public,

and people actually like the video that I made.

Last year, I had dropped an OnlyFans workshop.

I help other girls make money,

and pretty much learn the ropes to where I guide them,

because there's a lot of girls that get into OnlyFans,

where it's like, that $1,500 promo,

that's a lot of money to them.

So to me, it was like, I started a workshop where it's like,

I guided girls to help them find good promo.

Pretty much just told them all the things,

all my lessons I learned,

to where they wouldn't make those same mistakes

to protect their investments.

Sex will always sell.

There's a lot of technology going out there right now.

The community seems to be growing so much.

The aspect of self-creating, personal content creators,

like OnlyFans, people shooting for themselves,

people shooting their own content,

as opposed for shooting for companies.

It also sort of set the bar for people accepting

that we just want to make money and have better lives.

We don't really dream of labor.

There's, of course, jobs that are extremely important in this world,

but a lot of us just need to pay rent. [chuckles]

From DVD to like, just so easy, our cell phones to watch us.

And right now like VR scenes are very popular.

I just feel like the technology for adult entertainment is graduating.

They're going to the next level.

I think we're going into AI.

I think we're going into AI porn and it's making me so sad

because I don't want my job gone. [laughs]

There's going to be more people in the adult industry

because again it's more socially acceptable.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now

you see people that had an OnlyFans and are running for public office.

People like performers used to make their main income

just with production companies,

and nowadays everything is digital,

online like anybody.

You can go out to a restaurant and the waitress

could have an OnlyFans page.

I don't think AI is the next thing.

Talking to a robotic version of a girl,

I just don't think is it.

VR was supposed to be the next big thing,

which I'm a huge fan of, but it didn't catch on.

It's not catching on.

It looks like porn is here to stay,

but the human connection style of porn, OnlyFans,

is what people are wanting more and more of.

I think that's the biggest shift and that will continue to be

the biggest shift moving forward.

I see it growing and I see it being more accepted, which...

you know, that could be a good and bad thing.

People love watching porn.

For the horizon of adult performers is,

it's sunny.

I think there's a lot of opportunities

that will be able to come out of this,

especially with the rise of OnlyFans.

All the opportunities that will rise out of that.

[intriguing music]