Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
How y'all doing?
All right. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Hey, Endless Threaders. That's us at WBUR's City Space. A few weeks ago, getting ready to talk about OnlyFans.
And if you don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband. Just kidding. Really, that's a joke made by one of our onstage guests, who is among the four and a half million creators on OnlyFans, each cultivating their own little online community.
Chapter 2: What is OnlyFans and how does it work?
Or for some of them, not so little, because OnlyFans has 400 million users.
And journalist Leon Nafok wanted to know more about this online ecosystem. You may know him as the creator and host of podcasts like Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Backfired.
But for this new show, he teamed up with Gracie Kanin, a stand-up comedian and OnlyFans creator, to examine this bustling online marketplace of sex and emotions and try to understand the role it plays in the lives and relationships of the buyers and sellers.
Leon and Gracie's new podcast from Audible is called Only Fantasy, and they told us all about it at the WBUR Festival. Take a listen.
So for the uninitiated, I figured, Gracie, we would start with you. For people who do not know what Only Fans is, you are a creator on Only Fans. How would you describe it? You know, it's so funny because even after making this podcast, I feel like I still don't have a succinct log line of what this is. It is a platform that is really like an all-in-one for digital sex workers, right?
So it's something that brings – or digital creators. It doesn't even have to be – sex work. It is something that combines selling your videos with chats, with live streams. So it's really a one-stop shop for creators and subscribers to connect whatever the content is. What sorts of things are OnlyFans subscribers paying for? For me specifically, I think, well, there are tiers.
So I have, you know, mass PPVs, pay-per-views, which is like I'll send those out to everyone and those can be paid. Honestly, they're not very explicit. I try to make people feel connected and maybe a little bit sexual in a creative way. So it might be me doing a little dance or me doing something like pouring water on myself. I don't know. There we go. Literally falling apart. What's up, guys?
Yeah, Casio. Taking your watch off. That could be a cute thing. You got that for free. Yeah, this is the beginning of a strip tease, guys. So I just want you to know. And then I think mostly people do pay for a connection. So if I get like an $100 tip out of nowhere, that's someone who really wants to chat to me. And then there's all...
And that's the cool thing is every creator has their main source of revenue, right? So whether it's some people rely really heavily on custom videos, right? Where they sell something for $100 plus. Some people do.
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Chapter 3: What types of content do OnlyFans creators offer?
I had always pictured OnlyFans as a one-way street, a place to publish exclusive content that your most motivated fans could pay to look at. End of story. Annie told me that I'd been missing the point. Most of the money people made on OnlyFans, she said, came from more than just being looked at.
It came from maintaining quasi-personal relationships with subscribers over weeks or months or even longer.
A lot of the people were just lonely and sad. So they really just genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day, text them good morning in the morning, good night at night, send them a couple photos. Didn't even have to be like naked photos, just cute photos. Some were literally like me in an oversized hoodie in front of the mirror.
But not all of them, Annie. You showed me. I remember you showed me a couple pretty racy things you posted.
This is my little sister, by the way. There were a lot of the times they wanted you in a hoodie, wanted you in a messy bun. They wanted you to not look like they were paying for you, basically.
Well, you ruined the surprise. I was going to ask you who Annie was, but surprise.
Oh, sorry. Did everyone get that? It's his little sister.
So why did you, other than the fact that your sister, or maybe your sister was a key component of why you wanted to look into OnlyFans, but what set off you making a whole series about OnlyFans?
Well, so OnlyFans took off as a platform during the pandemic when people, you know, for all the obvious reasons, people were at home, people were out of work, people were lonely. And in the five years or so since, which takes us right up to when I think we started working on this, it had exploded to the point where the numbers were just astonishing.
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Chapter 4: How do creators build relationships with their subscribers?
Yeah, we're all OnlyFans creators and And we're all whores. And if anyone, as someone who gets called a whore online all the time, you are selling your mind and body every day to make money. So I just want you guys to know, everyone in here, unless you're living off your parents' money, which is a different kind of whore.
But I want to say as far as the marketing, this is my first podcast project, which I got incredibly lucky about. All of my other podcast friends hated me. But I'm a stand-up comedian and so I am, for better or worse, very used to that relentless marketing grind. But a lot of creators we talk to kind of look back on their earlier days and realize, oh my God, so much of this is marketing.
It's more than creating the actual content and chatting to people.
It's going viral.
It's like trying to go viral on Instagram, on TikTok. It's posting, you know, I spoke with an agency and they were like, if you're already posting, like come back and talk to us when you're posting five times a day on TikTok, just on TikTok. So I know it's, and I mean, they're little things.
They're not, these are not, you know, it's just like, I'm doing a dance or like cinnamon challenge or whatever. But so that is when, and this is something we can get into later, but that is... really a huge incentive of why creators work with agencies. It's not that they can't, you know, it's not so much the chatting or the creation.
It's the constant marketing push across all social media platforms. We're going to talk more about agencies because this is an important part of the business. But I want to hear from another clip from the podcast because this also speaks to the marketing aspect. This is a creator named Belle Grace that you talked to.
And to your point, Leon, Belle Grace blows up accidentally during the pandemic through the act of marketing herself. She's posting videos on TikTok to try to get people to her OnlyFans page. And in December of 2020, one of those TikTok videos goes viral. The timing is great because she's just quit her day job because she's starting to make more money on OnlyFans.
And let's listen to a bit of what happens when the video goes viral.
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Chapter 5: What are the financial realities for OnlyFans creators?
They take 20% of all earnings, which some people complain about. But for the most part, I'm like, if I didn't have OnlyFans, it would be four different platforms that I would have to manage. I don't think I would make as much money. So for me, 20% seems like a low lift.
And Apple takes 30% if you make an app. Yeah, I was going to say, it's pretty normal. So like 20% is actually pretty normal.
Yeah, yeah. So I don't have a problem with that. And they're actually quite, like when you check your weekly, monthly statements, it actually just shows your net automatically. So they're not kind of dangling that. They're like, yeah, here's what you have. So yeah, that's how they make their money. That's it. They just take the hours.
We have more of our conversation with Leon Nafok and Gracie Kanin on their new podcast about OnlyFans in a minute.
Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Ships move the vast majority of the world's goods, and it's cheaper and safer compared to trucks or planes.
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So how does an industry this essential think about sustainability? Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about what it will take for ocean freight shipping to reach net zero emissions.
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Chapter 6: How does OnlyFans compare to traditional pornography?
I personally don't worry about it for me. I think that the people who are gravitating towards AI creators are also the people that are gravitating towards creators that are completely run by agencies. So I don't view it as a threat to myself at all.
I just think it's more a continuation of this weird dystopian world, especially when you look at these AI creators on Instagram and you have real human men being like, you are so gorgeous. Then it's just like, whoa, where are people's minds? So I think it's more... just disturbing, as we all know, than a threat.
I think that people will, maybe this is optimistic, but I don't think there is a replacement for human connection.
I think the chatters are not long for this world because I think... The human chatters. Correct. Yeah, I think an AI will not make those weird grammatical choices that tip me off to the fact that I was talking to someone in a foreign country. We talked to a few men who were like, I would rather be duped by an AI than realize that I've been spilling my guts to some random guy who I, you know...
who actually heard what I was saying. I think people, and we've seen this, people like talking to their chatbots. A lot of people do it. Right, Gracie?
Yep.
I just think the chatting function, I would expect, will be taken over by AI.
How do you feel about the morals of all of this and on balance OnlyFans good, OnlyFans bad, somewhere in the middle, just a continuation? How did you come away from this project feeling about it as a platform?
Is it doing more harm than good to speaking to the loneliness piece of it? I honestly came out of this platform or out of this project more confused and less opinionated than I did when I went into it, I feel like. I mean, it is. It's a continuation of sex work. It's, you know, everyone has had the same problems with... whether it's OnlyFans or, you know, old school Victorian era prostitution.
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